Why Is Karl Marx So Popular In Universities?
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1 hour and 18 minutes
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170.59702
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Summary
In this episode of Valley Team, we have a special guest on the show, Paul Kanger, who is the bestselling author, professor, historian, and commentator. In this interview, we talk about Reagan, Karl Marx, and the fall of communism.
Transcript
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I never thought that I would be talking about why they shouldn't support communism.
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I thought we would have learned that lesson over 30 years ago.
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So, historically, socialism, that's what it is.
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It's the final transitionary step to communism.
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Do you think America is eventually going to get to the point of losing citizens?
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if we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to.
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Well, it's true. If we lose freedom here, where else are we going to go to?
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In fact, Ronald Reagan came from an era where people could disagree.
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this culture of intimidation, of cancel, and it starts going after people.
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And I find that one of the more disturbing things about America today.
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They're not taking the time to research things.
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we should not be having the debate as to whether or not communism is bad.
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And the fact that we are shows we're really in trouble as a country.
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We have a special guest with us here today. He is Paul Kanger, who is the bestselling author,
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professor, historian, and commentator. And we're going to focus on two topics today. One topic
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is going to be Karl Marx, which he wrote a book that just came out, I think, August of 2020,
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a few months ago, thousand plus reviews on Amazon. It's been a big hit. It's called The Devil in Karl
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Marx, Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration. And we're going to focus on a
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second individual in today's interview. And that is Reagan, Ronald Reagan, which he,
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Paul, wrote a book called The Crusader, Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism in 2006, which is
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turning into a movie starring Dennis Quaid. It's going to have Jon Voight and a lot of other folks
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in a great lineup of, but it's based on the book that my guest today wrote. With that being said,
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Paul, thank you so much for being a guest on Valley Team.
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Well, thank you, Patrick. I'm very impressed with you, your background, and it's a joy to be with you.
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Thank you. Yeah. I've, you know, I've watched your videos and the way you explain things. I told you
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this off, you know, before the interview getting started, I said, you're extremely necessary today,
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and I hope the audience gets a lot out of our interview. So, you know, Paul, if we can start,
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what makes somebody like you want to, a historian can study a lot of different things. It can be war,
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some are World War I, some two, some it's a different war, some it's military, some it's history
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having to do with different characters, but why the focus on Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan?
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Well, that's a good question, Patrick. So I, it goes, it goes back to, I'd say my kind of formative
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years in college. I was in college in the late 1980s. I went to the University of Pittsburgh,
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where I, where I was pre-med and I, I worked for the organ transplant team at the University of
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Pittsburgh. So I know you probably didn't expect me to say this, right? This to be part of my answer,
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but, but I was, I, the Dr. Thomas Starzl was the organ transplantation pioneer. They did 80 to 90%
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of the world's organ transplants at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s. So, so I was there,
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right? This is, this is my life. This is my career. This is where I'm going. I'm going to go to medical
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school. I, I, I worked 30 hours a week while I was in college for three years. And then when I graduated,
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I worked full-time, did research on immunology, anti-rejection drugs, but it was 1988, 1989. And it
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was the collapse of communism, the end of the cold war, the end of the Reagan presidency, Mikhail Gorbachev,
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Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia,
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the solidarity movement, the Iran Contras, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, all this stuff, right?
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So I was really intrigued by it. And well, I could say a lot, I don't want to go off on too much of a
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tangent, but I I'll tell you, I was non-political. I was non-ideological. And I knew all these great
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debates were going on around me. I started following them. I started paying attention.
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I wrote a letter to the editor, to the student newspaper, which was called the Pitt News, which
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was a daily newspaper published four days a week, Monday through Thursday. The editor said,
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hey, I really like this. I'm going to, I'm going to run this as an article, if you don't mind.
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And he ran it as an article. It was called, by the way, it was about the homeless. And as a, as a
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science major, a non-political person, non-ideological person, I heard these people
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on campus who I was told were, were liberals, right? And they were blaming the homeless problem
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on Ronald Reagan. And I thought, how is this? What year was this? What year was this when you
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wrote this? Just curious. So this would have been 1988, 1989. Got it. So the liberals are blaming Ronald
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Reagan, homeless, continue. I'm sorry. Right, right. So, so I did a little research on it,
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like a science major would do, right? So I tried to find out. I read some different publications.
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I talked to some homeless people. I called the local homeless shelter. And I asked the lady at
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the local homeless shelter, I said, hey, so I'm doing some research on this as a student. I asked
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her a bunch of questions. And at the end of this, Patrick, at the end of the interview, I said, okay,
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so why is this Ronald Reagan's fault? And she said, young man, Ronald Reagan's fault. These people are
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mentally ill. I don't know what they're teaching you at that university, right? Well, I know they're
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not all mentally ill, but this was her response, right? And, and, and so I wrote this up in the
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student newspaper for the student. They published it as a column and I got called a racist, probably for
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the first time in my life, right? I got called a fascist. So the next article that I wrote, by the way,
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this is symptomatic of, I think me and you both, right? When they attacked me, I didn't crawl under
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a rock. I said, I said, dammit, that's not right. Right. I'm going to respond to this. So I wrote
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another article on, on arming the Contras in Nicaragua, which I thought seemed like a common
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sense thing to do. I didn't know why people on campus were protesting this. Why wouldn't you oppose
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communism? I wrote that piece and I got called a Nazi of all things, a Nazi, right? A fascist.
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I remember my, my father picking me up from, from class on a Friday afternoon, giving me a ride
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home. He said, Hey, how's that newspaper column thing going that you're doing? I said, Oh, pretty,
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pretty good, dad. I said, you know, this is amazing. I got called a Nazi for the last column I wrote.
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He said, Oh, what? I said, a Nazi, a Nazi. I still remember him looking at me in the car, a Nazi.
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Yeah. I said, yeah. Yeah. He said, what are you writing about Hitler? I said, no, I'm not writing
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about Hitler. Dad. I said, there's these people on campus, they're called liberals. And when
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you disagree with them, they savage you. They call you the worst names in the book. They're
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calling me all these different names. And he said, well, you know, hang in there. I said,
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Oh, I'm going to hang in there. So I continued to write. And then pretty soon I ended up becoming
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the campus conservative, the editorial page editor. They called me all these different names. And here's
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the big picture to kind of long answer to your question. It was the end of the cold war. It was the
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collapse of communism. It was 1989. So this is what I wrote about. And I became really,
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really intrigued with the end of the cold war, communism, all these different ideologies and
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long process. I'll sum this up in 30 seconds. This was long and agonizing, but I decided not
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to go to medical school to instead go to graduate school. I went to American university in Washington,
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the school of international service and took up studying international affairs, the Soviet union,
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Eastern Europe, the middle East. I teach middle East politics to this day at Grove city college
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in Grove city, Pennsylvania. And, and I, that became sort of my calling, I guess that's what I
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started writing books on. And I started writing books specifically on the collapse of communism,
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the Reagan presidency, end of the cold war. And Patrick, I thought I'd be writing from communism,
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from a historical perspective, right? This is bad. This is evil. Here's how many people this
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ideology killed so forth. I never thought that in the year 2021, I would be talking about trying to
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teach people why this is bad, why they shouldn't support communism. I thought we would have learned
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that lesson over 30 years ago. Let me, let me ask you this, by the way, powerful right there on your
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testimony, how you came about what a timing, 88, 89 Reagan communism clashed. And it makes sense,
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to why wanting to study those two figures, but question for you, 88, 89 versus today, 88, 89,
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we didn't see what happened on campus. If there was no videos, if somebody was protesting against you,
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we didn't see any of that. That was taking place around the country. We didn't see that hardcore
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liberal. The media would have to go there to record it versus today. How big of a difference is it
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between 88, 89 versus 2020, 2021? Well, I started seeing a lot of this stuff back then. And that
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was when the very first article by Dinesh D'Souza on the cover of Atlantic Monthly, right? Which is the
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Atlantic magazine. And that was his book, Illiberal Education. That was sort of the start of the political
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correctness movement. And it's funny that we're having this conversation. I'm a senior editor for the
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American Spectator. I'm writing the history of the American Spectator, which I read in the late 1980s.
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And I was going back through that period, 89, 90. And I went back and grabbed from an old box in my
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basement, the articles that I wrote for my student newspaper. And the last one that I wrote was titled
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something like, Favorite Columnist, which is like a sarcastic thing, right? Says Goodbye to Some
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unthoughtful words, not with some unthoughtful words, to some unthoughtful words. And I went through
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words like fascist, Nazi, racist, homophobe, hater. You could get called all these words,
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even if you weren't these things, right? Just for simply opposing liberals and leftists on this stuff.
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So this sort of demonization of opponents, that was already going on. I think the difference now,
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what's so dangerous and sad about the current period is because of social media and media platforms
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today, you can really get a quite literal, right, Twitter mob against somebody. And, you know, people
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can come after you en masse by the thousands and millions. And there just wasn't that sort of, you
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know, alacrity speed of protest, of organizing that you see today. But that stuff was out there
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back then. And I remember too, one more, June 1989, two things in June 1989. The people of Poland held
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free and fair elections, all right, which had been promised at Yalta in 1945, 44 years later, all right?
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That same week, everybody forgets this was the same week, Tiananmen Square happened in China. And I
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remember the Chinese students on my campus, University of Pittsburgh, who came up to me as the conservative
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that they knew of on the student newspaper. And they said, we're looking to demonstrate. We're
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looking to hold a protest. We want some people to march with us. How do we find the protesters? And I
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kind of laughed, Patrick, because I thought, you know, these guys aren't going to protest this,
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right? I mean, they're protesting arming the Contras. You know, they're protesting apartheid in South
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Africa, right? But they're not on the streets protesting what's going on in Tiananmen Square.
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And these poor kids, they protested, they marched alone. And they marched alone on Pitt campus. They had
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paper bags over their heads to conceal their identities. They wore bandanas over their mouths so
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the regime back home wouldn't know who they were. But that was one of those lessons, too, that
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the American left, man, on a dime, they would protest what was happening in Chile under Pinochet,
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right? Years earlier, under Cuba, under Batista in the 50s, right? What was going on in South Africa?
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But you get, you know, a communist crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing. You know,
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if you pressed them and said, this is bad, right? They might say, yeah, it's bad. But they weren't
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marching in the streets over it. You know, so a lot of that stuff that we're seeing today
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was around. It's been around for years. Let me ask you. So I got three questions for you. So let
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me write down the third one so I can kind of get to it here. Okay. So number one question is the
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following. When I was in the army, they told me when you go in, as much as I used to curse a lot,
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because I, you know, pre-25, I cursed, I was a cursing machine. So when you go in the army,
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you know how they say they curse like, you know, you curse like a sailor or, you know, all that stuff.
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Everybody dropped the F-bomb. And when I tell you F-bomb, it was like every other word, like
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adjective, adverb, noun. It doesn't matter what it was, right? I grew up with guys like that.
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Okay. So I was one of those guys. Yeah. I got to tell you, Paul, after about a couple of weeks,
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I never heard the F-word anymore. Like I couldn't even hear it. So I get out of the army. I'm working
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at Valley Total Fitness and Chatsworth. My friend at the time, Fernando says, Pat, do you know how foul of a
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language you got? I said, what do you mean? He says, every other word out of your mouth is,
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and you're talking to customers like this. Like, let me see what I can effing get you.
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And I love it. Hey, what's up, mother? And I'm like, so go on. You just did it again. I'm like,
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oh, she says, you may want to kind of, if you want to kind of become a manager here one day,
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you got to clean up your language. So, you know what? I wasn't aware of it. So I kind of worked
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on it. Here's my point. Do you think the weight behind the word Nazi, racist, bigot has lost its weight
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because everybody's thrown around nowadays where it no longer has the weight it once had? Or do you think
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it still carries weight? Yeah, it should carry far less weight. And I mean, especially today where
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you can get called that for anything, for any reason. And this is something that I've tried to
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tell liberal friends of mine for years, right? You call somebody a fascist, right? Well, watch out
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because when the real McCoy comes along someday, no one's going to believe you when you call out
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somebody who's really a fascist. You call everyone a racist, no one's going to believe you
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when someone comes along who's genuinely a racist. And by the way, I say this to conservative friends
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a lot. Just because someone's a liberal, you disagree with them. Don't call them a commie,
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right? You know, communism is a very unique, specific thing. You know, you might call them a radical
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lefty, right? Call them a lefty crazy, call them a loony left, something like that. But, you know,
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don't fling that kind of language around. Both sides need to be more careful and thoughtful about
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their rhetoric and their names. But the left in particular, I mean, you know, I've had people
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say to me, I've heard this more in the past six months or so, especially after the Trump
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administration, right? That people just simply no longer take that charge of racists seriously,
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because the left has absolutely so abused it and annihilated it that it doesn't carry the weight
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Yeah, it's funny you say that. I had David Horowitz on. You know, David Horowitz, who is a pretty well-known...
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You had him at Grove City College, yeah, a couple of years ago. Amazing, yep.
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Yeah, I had him on and he kept saying, everybody, the Democrats are communists. I said, you can't say
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that. He says, I'm telling you they're coming. I don't believe every one of them is because we're
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losing them. He says, everybody keeps saying. So anyways, we had a nice, interesting conversation
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together on, because I agree with you on the fact that we're also labeling everybody. Not
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everybody's in the same box. Second question for you on this side here. So for me, as a person
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that's a business owner, I'm an entrepreneur. I have to always get to the bottom of the issue
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because you can fix issues on the surface. It keeps reappearing, but you got to get to the
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bottom of the route to figure out exactly why this issue keeps surfacing. So you said this
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has been going on for a while. Okay. So I'm 42. Okay. I came to the States November 28th,
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1990, which means I don't know pre-November 29th. Matter of fact, I didn't even follow
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politics for quite some time. So go even past that, right? If this has been going on forever,
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has this been going on forever as in since biblical times, pre-biblical times? Meaning, are we always
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going to go through this 20 years from now, 40 years from now, 80 years from now, 300 years from
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now, 800 years from, 1,000 years from now, because it's a cyclical cycle of one person makes the
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money. The other one says it's unfair. He feels envious. Let's take the money and give it to
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everybody else. So it's a constant pendulum that we'll go through and it's never ending. Or
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is it any way different today than it was before 40 years from now, 80 years from now, 100 years from
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now, 500 years from now, 500 years ago? Well, I do think it's worse now than ever, and it's getting
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worse. But like, for example, yesterday in class, I teach a course on Marxism. We're talking about the
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Hollywood 10 and every single member of the Hollywood 10 was, was a, was a member of Communist
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Party USA. We had their five digit Communist Party USA numbers. In fact, they were presented before the
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members of Hollywood 10 when they were speaking to Congress, October and November, 1947, House
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Committee of Non-American Activities. John Howard Lawson, who was one of the worst of them, when he
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was called in to testify after telling all of his liberal friends in Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren
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Bacall, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, some of these wonderful actors and actresses, who, by the
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way, were liberals, right? They were not communists, right? They were progressives. But he was telling
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them, I'm not a communist. These right wing fanatics in Washington, I'm not that. I'm not. I'm like you.
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So he got up there and he testified before Congress and they said, Mr. Lawson, here on
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this billboard, here on this poster board, here's your Communist Party USA number. Here's
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all the checks you wrote out to Communist Party USA. Here's your dues. Here's your application.
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And John Howard Lawson, Patrick, you know what he did? He kind of stirred in his seat and
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he yelled, Nazis, right? This is like, this is like the Reichstag fire in Berlin. He just
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started calling him names, right? He just started calling. And these guys, all that they had done
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was expose them as being a communist. So what did he do? He called them all these names. Probably
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would have called him a homophobe if that name had existed back then, right? So you see this among
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the kind of extreme left for quite some time. I'll go back a little further. Karl Marx, I spend a lot
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of time on this in The Devil and Karl Marx. Marx and these Marxists like to say that business people
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are capitalists who are obsessed with money, right? No, guys like Marx and Marxists and communists,
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they're the ones who are obsessed with money. That's all that these guys think about. You read some of
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Marx's anti-Semitic statements. They are chilling, right? He says things like, what is the worldly
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God of the Jew? Money. What does the Jew worship? Haggling. And I read that and I think to myself,
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no, Karl, you're the one that worships money, right? You're the one that's obsessed with money.
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You're so obsessed with money that you can't even think enough about your own money. You think about
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everybody else's money, right? You want a central government to come in and forcibly take it and
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redistribute it. So it's funny. Oftentimes when they're yelling at you, hater, screaming at them,
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and you're thinking, I'm not hating at all. I've got a smile on my face while you're talking to me.
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They're projecting onto you what they're really feeling. And they do that a lot with money and
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attacking people with property and attacking capitalists. A lot of this is a sort of self-projection.
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And it's almost psychological by some of these individuals. Paul, what was communism called
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pre-communism? That's a good question. And I had a professor in graduate school who used to like to
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say that the Jacobins were the first communists, right? And so the Jacobins, of course, were there
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in revolutionary France, beheaded 40,000 people by guillotine in one year between 1793 and 1794.
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And of all things, today in the American left, one of the more popular avant-garde ideological
00:20:42.720
magazines is called the Jacobin. And they have a little meme with a guillotine. It's nothing to
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laugh about, right? Nothing to laugh about. But Marx and Engels in 1848 published the Communist
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Manifesto. And the Communist Manifesto was the official programmatic statement or manifesto
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of the Communist League in that day, which was made up of about 48 people, all Germans, all men,
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with the exception of Marx's wife. I think she was the only woman in the group. So at that point in
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time, and people have tried to pin down who first used the word communism. The great Richard Pipes,
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the Harvard historian, said that he believed it was coined in Paris in the 1840s. I don't know
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exactly for sure. But Marx and Engels met in Paris in the 1840s. And they published the Communist
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Got it. So now, before we talk about Karl, before we talk about Reagan, let's focus on Karl here.
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So who was Karl growing up, family, parents, upbringing, school? How was he in school? What
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stories do we need to know about him that influenced him to become who he ended up becoming with writing
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Yeah, he was born in Trier, Germany, May 5th, 1818. So Trier is spelled like Trier, T-R-I-E-R.
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And it was one of the most religious cities in all of Germany, very heavily Roman Catholic. In fact,
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the ancient cathedral in Trier was built in the 320s. The 320s, not the 1320s, the 320s, around the year 330.
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And it was built, financed by Helena, St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, of all things, who made a
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pilgrimage to the Holy Land and came back with all sorts of artifacts. She believes that she found
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the actual cross that Christ was crucified on, the actual crown of thorns, which to this day
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allegedly is the cross of thorns that's in Notre Dame, in Paris. And she even believes that she
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found the holy robe, which was the robe that Christ wore on the way to the crucifixion that the Roman
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soldiers cast lots for at the feet of Christ at the crucifix. That holy robe is in the cathedral in
00:23:06.160
Trier. So Marx grows up in a very, very religious city. His father, the family was Jewish, many rabbis
00:23:15.380
in the family background, pretty faithful family. Father converted to Lutheranism, probably at least
00:23:23.020
in part under the social pressures of the day. But the father always believed in God, Patrick. And he
00:23:30.820
even said he would tell Carl, he'd say, you know, believing in God is a good thing for a young man,
00:23:36.260
Carl, right? It gives you some accountability, something beyond yourself, a sense of ethics,
00:23:41.940
right? Kind of a sense of absolute, something that you could follow. Carl was baptized around the age of
00:23:48.340
five, 1823, 1824, became a fairly passionate Christian through his teen years, and then fled the
00:23:57.640
faith in college, where probably the biggest influence in college was a very anti-Semitic theology
00:24:05.080
professor that he had named Bruno Bauer, who was such a bad theology professor that the other faculty
00:24:12.700
members ran him out of the college. He was teaching heresy. And so Bruno Bauer and his favorite student,
00:24:20.920
Karl Marx, together in 1841, started what they called an archives of atheism, a journal of atheism,
00:24:28.480
which quickly folded because they couldn't get any support for it. But at that point, he pretty much
00:24:35.120
put religion behind him in the 1840s, and became a pretty militant, aggressive atheist after that.
00:24:43.620
Was there a follow-up between him and his dad and his parents, or no?
00:24:48.440
I quote a chilling letter in The Devil and Karl Marx. I think it was March 2nd, 1837, March 1837.
00:24:56.640
And it's a letter between Marx and his father. And the father is very harsh toward him in that
00:25:03.320
letter. And I really think it's excessively harsh. But Marx loved his father, admired his father.
00:25:11.860
And after that, the father died not long after that. And Marx, from there on, looked at his parents,
00:25:19.340
while his mom, primarily for money. Marx was horrible about making money. An absolute deadbeat dad
00:25:27.920
who would not provide for his wife, would not provide for his children. Both his mother and his wife
00:25:34.180
expressed the wish that Karl would start earning some capital instead of just writing about capital.
00:25:40.040
He sent his wife out begging for money to his wife's in-laws. Karl went to his own in-laws.
00:25:48.040
The only way that Marx was able to do what he did was because of Friedrich Engels,
00:25:53.840
because Engels inherited a pile of money from his capitalist, wealthy, industrialist father.
00:25:59.380
And Engels became Marx's sugar daddy, his subsidizer. And frankly, Engels was pretty sick of it too,
00:26:07.060
the way that Karl all the time was pumping him for money constantly. Marx refused to earn a living.
00:26:15.680
The family, his wife, Jenny, Jenny's family was so upset at Karl's refusal to make any money that the family
00:26:24.380
lent their nursemaid, a girl named Helene DeMuth, who had grown up with Jenny. The family loaned her out
00:26:32.020
to Karl and Jenny, and they called her Lentgen. Karl refused to pay her a penny. And in fact,
00:26:40.640
Karl got her pregnant behind Jenny's back. And then Lentgen, Helene, had a baby. Karl refused to admit
00:26:49.180
that the child was his, and of course, refused to pay the child a penny of child support. So the type
00:26:57.640
of world that Marx was looking to create would have been a world where the government took care of
00:27:03.420
somebody like Karl. Well, he sat around on his butt with carbuncles and boils and refusing to bathe
00:27:11.480
and never earned a dollar. I mean, that's the type of world that he was looking to create for himself.
00:27:17.460
What was his logic? Like, what was his motive and logic behind that way of thinking?
00:27:22.660
In his own personal life? Yes. And the way he was like, I'm not, I'm refusing to help out my wife,
00:27:28.240
you know, anybody. What was his logic to say, I'm not moving. People need to take care of me,
00:27:32.440
not me taking care of them. Was it because he felt he was above people or because he felt people
00:27:37.460
owed him something because of being mistreated? What was it? I don't think it was the latter. He did feel
00:27:43.860
that people owed him something. He was, he was very bitter. And he was very angry and superior to
00:27:50.180
others. Oh, yeah. I mean, Marx was, it was hard for Marx ever to keep a friend. He eventually ran afoul
00:27:57.420
of everybody. I quote some of the vitriol between him and Mikhail Bakunin, who wrote God the State and
00:28:06.440
Revolution. No, I'm messing that up. But, but he was another militant atheist and said, oh, here's
00:28:12.260
Carl flinging his bile at me now, like he does at everybody. And Ingalls was one of the only people
00:28:19.320
who hung with him. And in fact, when, when Ingalls mistress died, Ingalls, Ingalls did not believe in
00:28:25.760
marriage. So he refused to marry any of the women that he lived with, but he loved this woman. And Carl
00:28:31.960
wrote him a note where, and even the Marx biographers, the hagiographers, the people who
00:28:37.160
like Marx say, oh, this was really offensive. This was a low blow by Marx. Marx in the first one or two,
00:28:43.400
three lines acknowledges the death of Ingalls' girlfriend, and then gets on to the next 20,
00:28:50.260
30 lines with a more important question of asking Ingalls for more money. And Ingalls was so offended by
00:28:56.440
this. He wrote back this diatribe letter. Even my capitalist friends show more sympathy than you.
00:29:04.180
And, and he almost cut Marx off permanently at that point, but he came to realize that Marx was,
00:29:10.660
this is how Marx was. He always thought about himself.
00:29:15.020
What was, what was Ingalls reasoning for wanting to financially support Marx? What was,
00:29:21.160
what's in it for him? Yeah. The cause, the cause of communism. And when Ingalls first met Marx,
00:29:29.120
he, he, he referred to him in a poem as the monster of 10,000 devils, the monster of 10,000 devils.
00:29:36.800
And he talks about this poem, this black man from Trier, right? He's using black here in the,
00:29:43.940
in the sense of darkened, right? Like, like darkened figure, this foreboding presence.
00:29:48.560
We had the strange allure too. And Ingalls faith story is much more complicated. He had grown up
00:29:55.320
a Christian, never really wanted to leave the faith and always had this kind of,
00:29:59.860
so he felt Carl like pulling him over to the dark side almost, but they formed this partnership,
00:30:06.280
the communist manifesto. I quote in the book, Marx, Ingalls writing to Marx, Carl, give a little
00:30:13.000
more thought to the communist confession of faith. I think we should drop the catechetical form and just
00:30:20.520
call it the manifesto. So they even talked about this document that they were writing in religious
00:30:26.040
like language. So this became something deeper for them. This was their calling, right? This,
00:30:32.940
this was their vocation. This was, this was like a, almost a religious enterprise to them.
00:30:37.460
And they hung in there and became lifetime partners and wrote pretty much everything together.
00:30:45.020
What, the good stuff that's written about Marx, who wrote it and what good things did they say
00:30:50.280
about Marx? Well, all the recent Marx biographers over the past 20 years are all pretty much
00:30:56.300
hagiographers, right? They just, they idolize the guy. These are like biographies for saints. They,
00:31:03.320
they, and you really got to go through and kind of pull out the stuff from all of these to put
00:31:10.160
together the puzzle. It's the, it's amazing the stuff that they ignore. They ignore all of,
00:31:16.140
all of Marx's poetry about the devil, which is what I focus on quite a bit. But earlier Marxist
00:31:22.760
biographers and historians talked about it, including Robert, gee, why can't I think of his name?
00:31:31.140
It's terrible. But his biography of Marx, 1968, he published Robert Payne, Simon and Schuster,
00:31:37.600
New York university press, NYU press, but, but the, but the Marxist biographers today,
00:31:42.820
they tend to go very easy on them because they like Marx. Marx is their guy and they're writing
00:31:49.340
kind of a cream. How do they paint them? What picture are they painting with them? Like even let's
00:31:54.760
say they're trying to write, sell them as a, this figure who wanted to take care of the little guy.
00:32:00.160
How do they sell him? Like what stories do they have to say that one time he saw a bird and it
00:32:06.200
was on the ground hurt and he picked them up and brought them home and fed them for three months
00:32:10.500
and build a ring and he winged and he flew off. Like, is there, what stories are they telling about
00:32:15.980
him? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, these, these are in many way love letters. In fact,
00:32:21.820
one of the Marx biographers, recent ones, her name is Mary Gabriel. And she wrote, I think it's called
00:32:28.120
Love and Capital, which is a biography of Karl Marx and his wife. And I got that and I thought,
00:32:34.480
how can this be a Valentine, right? I mean, how in any way that'd be fair to Gabriel. She does talk
00:32:41.740
about some of the sordid stuff, the bad stuff, the cheating, you know, Marx not fulfilling his role
00:32:48.660
as a husband, letting down Jenny. But at the same time, you know, she really drills down and
00:32:53.720
accentuates and focuses on the nicer things about them. So she doesn't ignore everything.
00:33:01.440
Some other Marx biographers though, they're, they're pretty bad. I'll give you an example.
00:33:05.260
I don't want to call this guy out by name, but, but I focus on a moment between Marx and a guy named
00:33:11.900
Karl Heinzen, who was a fellow socialist and, and Marx like corners Heinzen in his apartment.
00:33:19.240
And Heinzen said, he was staring at me with the eyes of a wet goblin, right? He almost described
00:33:24.860
in demonic terms. We had just drank a couple bottles of wine. Marx wouldn't let me out of the
00:33:30.820
apartment. And, and Marx is like taunting me. And, and, and this guy, Heinzen finally said,
00:33:36.200
if you don't get out of my way, I'm going to throw you down. And he had to slam Marx down and,
00:33:41.220
you know, break out of the apartment, got outside, went down the steps, got outside. And Marx is like
00:33:46.440
yelling at him from the apartment window. This biographer who tells this story, his first name
00:33:51.200
is Francis. He tells it, he thinks it's charming. He thinks the story is charming. And I read that and
00:33:57.460
I thought, what the, what the hell? How could, how could anybody, you know, I'm literally thinking
00:34:04.820
hell. I mean, the guy's describing Marx in like demonic terms.
00:34:09.920
I was like, did Marx like men? Did Marx like men or no? Was he attracted to men?
00:34:19.000
I know. I don't, I don't know. But how anybody, how two people, this is how two people could look
00:34:24.020
at something and one could say, oh man, this is chilling. This is all the other guys like,
00:34:27.760
oh, how charming. But I, I, I think it's the other guy's fault. I know I'm biased too, but
00:34:33.800
I look at that and I don't think this isn't charming. This isn't funny.
00:34:37.720
So, yeah. So let me, let me, let me go a little bit deeper in this. So now if you can just give us an
00:34:43.220
idea about what was the basic fundamental foundation of Marxism or communism.
00:34:48.700
Well, Marx and Engels said the entire communist theory or program may be summed up in a single
00:34:54.540
sentence. Abolition of private property. So there you go. I mean, that's, so if you had Marx and
00:35:02.000
Engels in the room and said, hey, in one sentence, describe communism. They'd say, well, that's easy.
00:35:07.220
We did in the communist manifesto, right? The entire communist theory may be summed up in the
00:35:11.640
single sentence. Abolition of private property. Beyond that, they had other basic little
00:35:17.380
definitions. Marx said, communism begins where atheism begins. And here, if I may read just a
00:35:23.880
couple of bullet points, this is Marx and the manifesto, Marx and Engels in the manifesto.
00:35:31.360
Communism represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations, by the way, which it sure does.
00:35:38.640
They acknowledge that communism, quote, seeks to abolish the present state of things, right? Seeks
00:35:46.600
to abolish the present state of things, of all things, right? I mean, this is key because we're
00:35:52.160
going from abolition of private property to abolishing the present state of things. So people who think,
00:35:59.340
and young people say this in surveys, well, communism's a pretty good idea. I mean, they talk
00:36:04.300
about love and sharing and sharing the wealth. No, read the book. They talk about abolishing the present
00:36:11.380
state of things. These guys aren't tinkerers. They're not talking about, like, increasing tax rates,
00:36:17.820
right? They're not talking about adding a couple of programs to the welfare state. Abolish the present
00:36:24.260
What does that mean to you? What does that mean to you?
00:36:26.180
Well, in the case of when you read the totality of what they're writing, it is truly a totalitarian
00:36:35.560
philosophy. And totalitarian in the strictest sense of the word, a fundamental transformation
00:36:41.900
of human nature. I mean, they are really looking to redefine human nature. The final paragraph of the
00:36:48.520
Communist Manifesto, everybody remembers, workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your
00:36:54.960
chains. They write this in the final paragraph. The communists openly declare that their ends can be
00:37:02.420
attained only by, now listen to this, only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
00:37:12.520
Okay? Our ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
00:37:21.940
I mean, you and I, right? We know this as scholars and intellectuals. You never say all about
00:37:29.540
anything, right? You might say, communists call for the forcible overthrow of those things in society
00:37:37.040
which are unjust, right? They want the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
00:37:44.800
And it marks, here's one more phrase in the manifesto, close of the manifesto, last page of the
00:37:50.040
manifesto. Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing
00:37:57.160
social and political order of things. Now you hear that and you think to yourself, this explains a lot,
00:38:03.700
right? You might be watching a particular rally on TV, a riot or whatever. You think, why is that guy
00:38:11.080
there with a hammer and sickle? What does that have to do with communism? Wait, they're protesting the
00:38:18.180
unjust death of George Floyd? What's the communists doing there? What does that have to do with communism?
00:38:25.360
Well, if whatever is going on, right, is some sort of movement against the existing social and political
00:38:31.600
order of things, these guys will be there, right? I mean, they'll team up. If it's redefining
00:38:39.780
marriage or gender or whatever else, something that you might think doesn't have anything to do with
00:38:45.420
capitalism or anything that these guys could have thought of in the 1840s, if it's about redefining
00:38:51.520
and annihilating the existing and social political order of things, they'll be there.
00:38:57.780
Paul, do you think he wrote this book with angles for them to experience the power themselves? Or was it
00:39:04.200
because I read somewhere where when this book was taken by, you know, Lenin, Stalin, all those guys,
00:39:09.380
it was almost like they wanted to take ownership for what this could happen, but Karl couldn't fulfill
00:39:15.220
his own prophecy. What was his long-term aspiration of writing this book? So the book came out in 1848,
00:39:22.180
so he had been 30 years old. He died in 1883. Ingalls died a little bit after that. So, you know,
00:39:28.900
he lives for 35 years after the publication of the book. And he talks in some of his glowing moments
00:39:36.040
about how communism will allow for him to fish in the morning, you know, farm in the afternoon,
00:39:44.200
raise cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, right? He talks about it in this very
00:39:49.500
utopian language as to whether he would have lived to see it if he believed he lived to see it. I don't
00:39:54.800
know. But, you know, he talked about communism as this dialectical march of history, this inevitable
00:40:01.700
march. This is part of the point of communism. This is inevitable, they believe. This is the inevitable
00:40:06.680
logic and march of history. In fact, Ingalls called it, they called it scientific socialism.
00:40:13.620
And Ingalls said in his eulogy for Marx at Marx's funeral, he said, this is the Darwin of the social
00:40:19.280
sciences. He has done for the social sciences what Darwin did for evolutionary biology. This is a natural
00:40:25.820
evolution of history. So history would evolve from feudalism, slavery, from feudalism and slavery to
00:40:33.840
capitalism, to socialism, to communism, right? So socialism would be the final transitionary step
00:40:40.500
to communism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, they get into power. Lenin at one point in January 1917 was
00:40:48.260
depressed. He said, I don't think I'll live to see the revolution in my lifetime. And then America
00:40:53.240
declared war, World War I, Woodrow Wilson, April 2nd, got a war declaration of Congress, April 6th, 1917.
00:41:01.260
The Tsar abdicated and the Germans put Lenin on a boxcar and let him pass through, dropped him in the
0.71
00:41:09.420
middle of St. Peter's Square. And by October of 1917, the Bolsheviks had their revolution.
00:41:15.920
So, and Marx and Lenin and Stalin and these guys, they believed, Lenin wrote a number of important
00:41:22.520
articles and statements on this. They believed that the revolution needed a vanguard, a regime,
00:41:29.400
a cadre, a group of individuals, a kind of an anointed group to raise the consciousness of the
00:41:34.920
masses and the workers, right? You couldn't just wait for this to transcend, for this to evolve.
00:41:41.560
No, we got to abolish this now. We got to abolish that now. We got to get to work. We got to take power.
00:41:48.020
Got it. So if you're, if you're looking at it right now, and you were to say the following
00:41:52.560
countries are full on communism, what would you say is full on communism based on their definitions?
00:41:59.660
Castro's Cuba, the Castro brothers, right? Raul now, Fidel died a couple of years ago.
00:42:05.900
The Kim's North Korea. Those are really textbook cases of totalitarian communism.
0.50
00:42:11.140
And, you know, and you get this all the time. Somebody watching this will probably complain,
00:42:16.960
a Marxist out there. They say this all the time, Patrick. Oh, well, that's not really communism,
00:42:21.780
right? That's an aberration of communism, right? Marx and Engels would have never supported
00:42:27.900
the gulags. Well, go to Marx and Engels 10 point, what do they call it? For the forcible overthrow of
00:42:35.580
all existing conditions, forcible overthrow, go through their 10 point plan. They say right there
00:42:41.260
at the 10 point plan. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be affected except by means of despotic
00:42:46.840
inroads. I mean, they realize any, any, you're a business person, any business person, non-business
00:42:54.620
person, anybody should realize that if you make a call for the abolition of private property,
00:43:00.180
you're going to have to use guns and gulags. I mean, people aren't going to roll over for that.
00:43:05.580
And right then and there, you ought to say to yourself, if this is an ideology that's going
00:43:12.320
to require locking people up and killing them and putting them on trains and hurting them off
00:43:17.020
to concentration camps, maybe we shouldn't go there. Maybe this is a bad idea, right? But that's,
00:43:26.680
this is an ideology that necessitates prison camps. I think it's unavoidable.
00:43:31.400
So when you hear Chinese communistic party, what's communistic about China?
00:43:36.440
Yeah, that's a great question. And modern China is such a weird case, right? So you have,
00:43:42.640
you have a country that from 1949 to 76 under Mao and the cultural revolution, the great leap forward,
00:43:50.920
that was full blown Maoism, communism, as Mao saw it, right? The signification of Marxism,
00:43:57.580
as he saw it. And then Deng Xiaoping came in in 1978, 79, created what he called socialism with
00:44:04.320
Chinese characteristics, where they reversed the collectivization. They started doing mass
0.98
00:44:09.860
privatizations. They started freeing up the economy. And basically, they did what was no longer
00:44:16.520
economically communism. So you have the weird situation in China to this day, where you have a
00:44:22.180
country that's politically communist, a one party communist state, but not economically communist.
00:44:31.100
What does that mean? One political party, communist, government is communism. What does it mean?
00:44:36.620
Well, and this is where, this is where the Soviet Union was, right? And, and the big thing that
00:44:41.460
Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1990, they abolished Article 10, or is it Article 6, of the Soviet Constitution,
00:44:48.280
which had a communist party monopoly on political power. And, you know, every, every communist state
00:44:55.620
ever, you can only have one political party. By the way, and you can't have free elections,
00:45:00.860
because people won't vote for communists, right? But I mentioned the, the, the elections in Poland in
00:45:08.840
June 1989 earlier, Patrick, they put 100 seats up for contested elections. Communists lost 100 out
00:45:15.600
of 100, okay? They didn't win a single seat, right? That's why Castro's Cuba won't hold elections.
00:45:22.180
This is why they don't hold elections, because people will vote communists out. People in the
00:45:26.020
West are like, communism's a pretty good idea. They don't live under it, right? Then why don't
00:45:30.480
the people ever vote for it? Why don't the leaders allow the people to vote for it? So in China, you have
00:45:36.000
a single party, communist party controlled state that doesn't allow political parties. The leader of the
00:45:42.340
party is the chairman, the president, whatever becomes the leader of the country. And they're
00:45:46.980
smart enough to realize that if they want an economy that works, you can't do true economic
00:45:54.420
communism. You got to allow enough free market reforms that you won't go broke and starve to
00:46:00.500
death. So it's weird what they're doing with communism in China. It's a very different thing.
00:46:07.020
The way I see it is Chinese communistic party, let's just say the government is communism is
00:46:11.200
no freedom of speech, you can't have an opinion, you better do as they say, and everything else,
00:46:16.180
you can make money. But the moment, Jack Ma, you think you're bigger than us, and you give a speech
00:46:20.860
on October 24th of last year, calling out the regulators and the government employees, let me
00:46:25.940
tell you, here's your $2.8 billion fine, we have new regulation about monopoly, and we are shutting
00:46:31.280
you down and you're not going public and Ant Group's going to be overhaul and all this other
00:46:35.380
stuff. Because you crossed the line, you started thinking you're bigger than China, and you're not.
0.80
00:46:39.240
So zip it, don't say a single word against us, or else. Okay, fair enough. So now, who would you say
00:46:45.280
today in America, if you were to say, the most influential person in America, that follows and
00:46:53.620
would like to aspire one day for America to be what Karl Marx talks about in his book,
00:46:59.040
Communist Manifesto, who would aspire to see America become that, if you were to say big name,
00:47:06.120
not small name, big names? Well, that's a good question. I mean, for that sort of hardcore,
00:47:11.940
you'd have to go to like Communist Party USA, website is cpusa.org. You'd have to go to like
00:47:18.220
the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the editors of People's World, which is peoplesworld.org,
00:47:26.340
that's the successor to the Daily Worker. There's a guy named Bob Avakian, who runs the Revolutionary
00:47:33.720
Communist Party. Revcom, they're known as. Bob Avakian is- Is he Armenian? Yeah, that's a good
0.98
00:47:41.900
question. It probably is Armenian. Yeah, A-V-A-K-I-A-N. If you look it up, Bob Avakian. They call
1.00
00:47:50.440
him Chairman Bob. And he's got at his website, his website, Revcom, Revolutionary Communist Party USA,
00:47:58.020
is all about him. So do you see it? Yeah. Yeah, that's him. He is Armenian, by the way. He's an
00:48:04.720
American-American lawyer, civil rights activist, and later judge on Alameda County, California Superior
00:48:12.360
Court. Interesting. Yeah. So he's a leader, and he is- When you saw last summer or last year, Patrick,
00:48:22.160
that Communist Party endorses Joe Biden for president, I remember I saw, I got that email
00:48:27.640
immediately because of who I am, right, in my email box. And I thought, wow, that's weird. Communist
0.62
00:48:32.060
Party USA. I know that they're for Biden and for the Democrat every four years, but they don't usually
00:48:36.920
endorse him because that hurts the endorsement hurts. So I clicked it. It wasn't Communist Party
00:48:42.340
USA. It was Chairman Bob. It was Bob Avakian. He's the one that endorsed Biden for that.
00:48:47.900
Is he a guy that debates and gets on different platforms and interviews or no?
00:48:53.120
I don't think he does much. From what I can tell, he's mostly solo and posts. For a while, he was in
00:48:59.600
exile and possibly in Paris. And I have often wondered if it was a self-imposed exile.
00:49:05.960
Well, we'll definitely reach out to him because we've had Slavoj Zizek on and we've had
00:49:10.420
Professor Richard Wolff on and a few other guys on. So I'm always curious to know,
00:49:16.400
to speak to them. So, okay. So I think, is it fair to say that the topic of communism is not
00:49:22.260
creating a lot of momentum in US at all? It's not like it's going to one day be a threat to US
00:49:27.680
again, like it was back in the days under Reagan. Well, here's the threat. And here, I think,
00:49:32.820
is the longer answer to your question. The people today who are sympathetic to communism
00:49:37.280
are calling themselves democratic socialists. And so if there's a kind of leader for that today,
00:49:43.780
first of all, there's Bernie Sanders. Okay. And Bernie Sanders was a formal presidential elector
00:49:50.440
to the Socialist Workers Party in 1980 and 1984. So 1980, when most normal Americans are deciding whether
00:49:58.100
to vote between Carter or Reagan, right? Bernie Sanders was supporting the Trotskyist Socialist
00:50:03.720
Workers Party. We've never found proof that Bernie was an actual member of the Socialist Workers Party.
00:50:11.560
But you look in his background, he's long been a supporter of it and probably knew better than to
00:50:16.400
actually formally join it. Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMagazine.com, David Horowitz's Freedom Center,
00:50:22.340
Ron Radosh. Look up their writings on Bernie's time in a Stalinist kibbutz in Israel in the early 1960s.
00:50:32.180
So Bernie was way to the far left. Bernie was never a Democrat until 2016, when he sought the
00:50:37.960
Democratic Party's nomination. He was an independent. James Carville said, Bernie's not a Democrat. Why is
00:50:45.280
he running as a Democrat? He's not even a Democrat. He's not. He's not a Democrat. But he came in second
00:50:50.920
for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. Bernie's a lifetime socialist. By
00:50:57.360
the way, one more thing, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, they published the publication The
00:51:03.380
Militant. And The Militant, you can look up online Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of JFK, holding the
00:51:12.300
rifle in one hand that he shot JFK with and a copy of The Militant newspaper in the other hand. That's
00:51:18.820
been around for a long time. The other leaders of the sort of modern socialism, the democratic
00:51:24.480
socialism, as they call it, it's the Democratic Socialists of America. That's the group. That's
00:51:30.720
it. Patrick, that is it. Communist Party USA says that they've had a membership surge where they're
00:51:37.240
now at about 5,000 members. That sucks, right? The Democratic Socialists of America are in a true
00:51:45.020
membership surge and are now up to about 90,000 altogether. And their poster girl is Alexandria Ocasio
00:51:53.620
Cortez. And the other one, in fact, if they have poster girls, it's the squad. Ilhan Omar, who I think is
00:52:01.980
the most radical member of the House. And the third one is Rashida Tlaib, who said of Donald Trump,
00:52:10.800
we need to impeach the mother blank. And the fourth one is Eliana Presley, although I don't think
0.97
00:52:16.500
Presley is an actual democratic socialist, but she's part of the squad. So that's really, that's where the
00:52:23.360
momentum is today. And if you look up democratic socialists online, look up Democratic Socialists of
00:52:30.640
America, annual convention, communist international. And they're singing the international at the start
00:52:39.860
of their convention and calling each other comrades, right? So they'll say, oh, we're not
00:52:47.760
communists. We're not even socialists. We're democratic socialists. But when you hear the rhetoric and see
00:52:53.920
what they say and you see what they read, like Richard Pipe said, you know, there's no meaningful
00:52:59.000
distinction between socialism and communism. Oftentimes, there's indeed not.
00:53:04.540
So if we look at communism, and they define angles and, and Marx say the abolition of
00:53:11.480
abolition of property, right? And then you have the at the end of the book, forcible overthrows of all
00:53:18.600
existing social condition. Okay, right. It's fine. So we have those two definitions, then what how would
00:53:24.780
you define socialism? Yeah. And Lenin wrote in the state and revolution, which is his kind of opus.
00:53:33.980
And he wrote that in 1917, couldn't finish writing it because got because the revolution overtook them.
00:53:40.520
But he wrote in there, he said, as Marx said, and in communism, socialism is just the final
00:53:48.340
transitionary step before communism. So you know, it's one phase that leads to a higher phase.
00:53:56.560
Marion Smith, who was the executive director of Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation,
00:54:01.380
says, well, just as religious believers, Christians and Jews aspire to heaven,
0.98
00:54:07.300
the socialist aspires to communism, right? Communism is the sort of New Jerusalem. Yeah, that's,
00:54:13.500
that's the, that's the utopia. That's, that's the heaven on earth. So in true Marxist-Leninist theory,
00:54:19.560
socialism is the final transitionary step to communism. Now that said, you'll run into all
00:54:25.060
sorts of socialists today who say, well, but that's not the kind of socialist that I am,
00:54:31.060
right? I don't support communism. I wouldn't go that far. I support single payer healthcare.
00:54:37.980
I support maybe government taking over the energy sector. I support this. Well, all right, fine. But
00:54:47.200
if you type in a Google or Merriam-Webster socialism, what will pop up is socialism,
00:54:53.000
common ownership of the means of production. So, you know, historically socialism, that's what it is.
00:54:59.360
USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It's the final transitionary step to communism.
00:55:04.800
It makes you, it makes you wonder. So, so I'm a math guy. I'm a numbers guy because it makes sense
00:55:13.100
to me and it's absolute, right? So if I look at communism, communism, if I go on one side, 100% to
00:55:19.400
me is communism. Okay. So is there a way to come up with a number that tells us where socialism is when
00:55:26.260
it comes down to taxes? Has that study been done? Because Arthur Laffer said yes, around 33 and a half,
00:55:31.400
34 and a half percent. And, you know, you've seen a lot of different studies, but is there a
00:55:36.820
way to quantify what socialism is since we know how to quantify communism?
00:55:42.820
That's a great question. I love that. And in my comparative politics course at Grove City College
00:55:48.200
every fall, we use the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. They rank countries from number
00:55:54.560
one to about number 170, most economically free to least economically free. And the top two have been
00:56:02.340
Hong Kong and Singapore pretty much ever since they started doing this study in the 1990s. And then you
00:56:08.640
have New Zealand, maybe Ireland, maybe the UK, maybe the United States were around the top 10.
00:56:16.260
And then China, I think, is usually around like 100, 120. Spain, Italy, France, you know, who knows,
00:56:25.300
30s, 70s, they're all over the place. But at the very end, the very end is always North Korea and Cuba.
0.82
00:56:32.460
Cuba. Yeah. So in a way, that guide I find very, very useful as kind of a ranking system. And a country
00:56:42.960
there that would be around 150. Venezuela is down at the bottom now, too. Zimbabwe is down at the
00:56:48.960
bottom. So I'd say when you're in that range of like the bottom 10 percent, bottom 20 percent,
00:56:54.940
150 to 170, you're kind of in, you know, collectivism, socialism, communism, you know,
00:57:01.200
that you're in that territory. Got it. But there's never been a number that they've put to it,
00:57:07.000
meaning if you pay more than 60 percent taxes, it's socialism. If you pay more than 30 percent
00:57:12.020
taxes, it's socialism. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. And to do
00:57:18.220
it through tax rates, to truly have abolition of private property. By the way, the top three in
00:57:24.640
Marx and Engels 10-point plan, abolition of property and land, graduated or progressive income tax. Oh,
00:57:31.720
and my favorite, abolition of all right of inheritance. All right. So abolition of all right
00:57:38.320
of inheritance would technically mean, right, for you and I who are practical guys or trying to figure
00:57:43.700
out what these guys are saying, that would have to be like 100 percent inheritance tax, right? Death
00:57:50.700
tax. So if you have a 100 percent tax on inheritance, it's the only way you're going to abolish all right
00:57:55.920
of inheritance. That would be communism. If you have a 50 percent tax rate on inheritance,
00:58:02.580
I'd like to call that socialist. I think it's pretty damned outrageous. 70 percent would be
00:58:10.040
outrageous. Tax rates. In the United States, we introduced the federal income tax in 1913,
00:58:16.460
permanent federal income tax. It was a few percentage points. By 1921, under Woodrow Wilson,
00:58:22.180
it was 73 percent. FDR took it up to 94 percent on income over $100,000. And FDR, if you read Burt
00:58:31.820
Folsom's book, FDR goes to war, FDR in the 1940s wanted a 99.5 percent tax rate on incomes over $100,000.
00:58:42.540
Now, I would call that pretty close to communism. He might not be quoting Marx when he's doing it,
00:58:48.360
but I'd have to say that that would be pretty close. A 99.5 percent tax rate on income over $100,000.
00:58:55.700
That's like almost complete confiscation and redistribution of wealth at that point. But to pick
00:59:01.220
a hard number, Marx and Engels never gave one. And this is infuriating for practical-minded business
00:59:07.060
people. They also, they would say, well, you know, at this point, you've left capitalism and then
00:59:12.680
socialism and then capital. I want to know at which point in the process we're there, right? I want to
00:59:18.880
know who's the vanguard, who's the group of leaders that say, oh, okay, all right, okay. We are now
00:59:24.300
comrades from point B to point C, right? I can now say that we've officially entered
00:59:31.580
communist society. None of this is ever clear and it has to be decided by dictators. That's what it
00:59:38.700
comes down to. Very interesting. By the way, on the 99.5, I mean, I would love to know what's the
00:59:45.960
right book to read, where it's going to be unbiased and it's going to tell me what was
00:59:49.300
his motive and taking it to 99.5? Like what is it? It's Burt Folsom, FDR Goes to War. He wrote it
00:59:57.580
with his wife, Anita. He's a Hillsdale professor, retired Hillsdale. What's the book about?
01:00:03.080
It's called FDR Goes to War. I got it. So it's about the 1940s and yeah, 99.5% rate. By the way,
01:00:12.060
people thinking, well, he must've just wanted it for wartime. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. FDR,
01:00:17.740
FDR had jacked the rate up to 91. The reason Ronald Reagan left the Democratic Party was over FDR's tax
01:00:25.520
rates. And that's what drove him out of the Democratic Party. That's probably more than
01:00:31.100
anything else. That's right. Because in Hollywood, they were getting crushed with the taxes,
01:00:35.860
but it was at the top. So it's okay. So now let's talk about Reagan. Who was Reagan and how did Reagan
01:00:42.880
come to his political conclusions of eventually obviously becoming a president of the United
01:00:47.920
States? Well, so he was, he had been raised an FDR Democrat. He called himself a hemophiliac liberal,
01:00:56.440
a bleeding heart liberal. He was a new dealer from the Midwest. And I mean, that's my family too. My
01:01:02.000
family's from Western Pennsylvania, coal mines, steel mills, Pittsburgh. And, you know, in those days,
01:01:08.260
they, you know, it was kind of the party of God, guns and labor in those days, right? It's interesting
01:01:14.340
that it's what Donald Trump really tapped into here in Western Pennsylvania, fracking industry,
01:01:20.080
West Virginia, coal mining. But so Ronald Reagan came out of that group. His mother was very religious,
01:01:27.760
very, very religious. And when Reagan went out to Hollywood in the 1930s, started making movies,
01:01:33.620
a lot of movies, 1930s and 1940s. Among other things, he became weary of, of kind of this hyper
01:01:41.620
New Deal collectivism, redistributionism, high tax rate, tax rates, what Reagan called creeping
01:01:48.740
socialism, where you start this new program, that new program, this new program pretty soon. How do we
01:01:54.640
pay for all of this? Well, how do you pay for it? Well, you increase taxes, right? On who? On the rich.
01:02:02.540
All right. Well, how do you get any higher than 91%? Well, we go to 94, right? How about 99.5? Right?
01:02:11.040
Yeah, Margaret Thatcher said the problem with socialism is you eventually run out of other
01:02:14.340
people's money at some point. So that got to Reagan. And what really got to Reagan was he saw
01:02:21.240
the communist infiltration of Hollywood. Reagan saw that with the Screen Actors Guild, he was president
01:02:27.800
of the Screen Actors Guild. And he also saw Reagan became a popular after dinner speaker in Hollywood
01:02:34.100
in the 1940s, where he would go around giving this speech, exoriating Nazism, fascism. And one day after
01:02:43.940
he gave this speech to a men's group at his church, the pastor, the Reverend Cleveland Klyauer came up to
01:02:49.700
Reagan and said, Hey, Ron, that's a great speech. You know, Nazism, fascism, evil, evil, evil, evil, evil,
01:02:56.860
evil. You know, Hitler's dead. There's no movement in the United States at all for Nazism. The war was
0.88
01:03:03.400
over three years ago. You know, Ron, out there right now, there's another threat out there. It's
01:03:07.760
called communism. And it's, it's pretty brutal, too. And I think your speech would be a lot more
01:03:13.500
powerful if maybe you just added in a little criticism about communism. And Reagan, Patrick
01:03:18.980
said, Well, that's a pretty good idea. I think I'll start doing that. So Reagan gives his typical
01:03:23.720
stump speech. And he's giving it to one of these progressive groups in Washington, right? And
01:03:29.500
sitting there, you know, the John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood, 10 types, way to go,
01:03:35.080
Ron, way to go, you know, get those Nazis, get those fascists. And then Reagan gets the end of the
01:03:40.580
speech. He writes about this in his memoirs. And he said, at the end of the speech, he said,
01:03:45.480
said, You know, there's another ism out there. And it's called communism, another totalitarianism.
01:03:50.960
And I'll tell you, if that ever becomes a threat to the United States, like Nazism was,
0.98
01:03:55.760
I will condemn that just as harshly. And Patrick Reagan said, You could hear a pin drop,
01:04:01.520
a pin drop, right? And he said, he got called names,
01:04:08.400
witch hunter, red baiter, fascist scum, all of a sudden, he's like persona non grata. He's like,
0.71
01:04:15.200
what am I doing? And he realized Reagan said, the reds weren't under the bed, you know, they were
01:04:20.800
they were in the bed. And a lot of these progressive groups that he thought were good
01:04:25.220
hearted liberals like him, were actually pro communists. So this awakened Reagan to the
01:04:31.600
communist threat in Hollywood, and the United States, and all of that, that FDR, everything else
01:04:37.560
began pushing him out of the Democratic Party, and toward eventually the Republican Party and
01:04:43.260
conservatism. He I'm currently finishing up Jim Baker's book. I don't know if you've read it or
01:04:50.940
not. The story, the man who ran Washington. I don't know if you've read it. I haven't read it yet. I
01:04:55.340
should. Yeah, he's, he's got a he gives a different angle on Reagan. And also, I'm not sure if you've
01:05:01.180
read killing Reagan. I'm sure you read killing Reagan by Bill O'Reilly. You know, he kind of takes
01:05:05.820
it. He pissed off George Will. And George Will was one of the guys that inspired me. March of 2009,
01:05:12.440
when I heard him speak at Miramar Hotel, when I was invited to an event by Larry Greenfield,
01:05:16.920
from the Claremont Institute with Larry Arn, and I heard him speak and Pat Boone was there and all
01:05:24.240
these other guys. But today, where we are today, you're a historian, you've read a lot. Obviously,
01:05:31.260
you're biased on one side, strong conservative, you even said it yourself earlier, we said, listen,
01:05:36.540
even me as a person who's biased, when you look at the part saying, where he is not letting his friend
01:05:41.020
go down. I mean, that's just that what do you mean romantic? Or what do you mean by you know,
01:05:44.160
the words that the guy used, right? Even I'm biased, that doesn't sound romantic to me.
01:05:48.760
I don't know if that's the word use, you may use a different word. But you know, I get what you were
01:05:52.600
saying. What is your biggest concern today? We're in America today, you know, we just got done with a
01:05:58.700
four term, you know, four years of Donald Trump, which, you know, if you're watching CNN,
01:06:05.420
MSNBC, he's the worst president of all time, if you're watching Fox, he's the goat. If you're
01:06:11.360
reading Wall Street Journal, he's great for the economy, but he's rattling too many cages. You
01:06:16.420
know, if you were depending on what you read, you have a different interpretation of who Donald Trump
01:06:21.280
is. And we go through Coronavirus, momentum creates, voting changes the way we're going to vote.
01:06:28.780
Biden wins, we wait six weeks to find out Georgia wins both seats. And then Biden inauguration,
01:06:36.340
Trump doesn't show up first time ever. And now we have America today. What is your biggest concern
01:06:42.020
of where we are today? Well, I'd say, indeed, this rise in support for socialism, people's lack of
01:06:48.960
understanding of it. And, and to the entire cancel culture, and just how nasty, and vicious people
01:06:57.200
are to one another. In fact, Ronald Reagan came from an era where people could disagree. And, and, and,
01:07:04.120
you know, the people in the 1980s, on the left side, who disagree with Ronald Reagan, you know, at least
01:07:11.600
they liked him as a person. They didn't feel that that you that you had to ruin someone's life. This idea
01:07:18.360
today, I mean, somebody will watch this today, and not like what I say, and, and want to write a letter
01:07:24.520
to the president of my college demanding I be fired. You know, it's, it, it, people so personalize
01:07:31.840
everything. There's a real lack of charity, of kindness, of decency, of people really getting along
01:07:39.360
like ladies and gentlemen, and having, you know, genuine disagreement. And also, two people just aren't
01:07:45.260
thoughtful, they're not well read, they're not taking the time to research things. I had a group
01:07:51.020
of faculty at a college where I was supposed to supposed to speak in California, last semester,
01:07:56.140
asked that the invitation to be to me be withdrawn. And for their evidence against what I had done,
01:08:04.620
they, they, they quoted some obscure online publication I hadn't even heard of. And from which
01:08:11.900
they took like a two line summary of a book that I wrote, it was all that they had, Patrick. And I
01:08:17.820
thought, these are fellow academics. I mean, read the book. I mean, how lazy is that? I mean, about
01:08:28.780
not just nasty, but lazy. But this is the kind of culture that that we're in. And it makes me not very
01:08:36.460
optimistic. I mean, is the Reagan a story and Reagan talked about the shining city on a hill. I mean, I feel
01:08:43.420
that we're not that shining city anymore. And it's going to be to turn this around. I don't, I don't know what
01:08:50.860
it's going to take. But 30 years, 30 plus years after the collapse of communism, we should not be having
01:08:57.260
the debate as to whether or not communism was bad. And the fact that we are shows that we're really in trouble
01:09:03.340
as a country. You think you get to a point where people are going to leave America and go to different
01:09:06.940
places to live, just like everybody else came from other countries to want to live in America. You
01:09:10.300
think America is eventually going to get to a point of losing citizens? Possibly. I mean, Ronald Reagan
01:09:14.780
said, if we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth. And he
01:09:20.220
was talking at that point about talking to a Cuban refugee. That was Reagan's 1964 time for choosing
01:09:26.540
speech. So I still wonder, well, it's true. If we lose freedom here, where else are we going to go to?
01:09:32.540
But I could see some people, especially professional people, feeling so harassed by the woke mobs and
01:09:40.220
everybody else in America, where they say, you know, I've had enough of this, I'll go live in Europe
01:09:44.780
or something. But in a way, you can't escape social media, right? You can't escape the power of the
01:09:52.360
internet and Twitter and everything else. So it takes a special kind of person, I think, and toughness
01:09:57.840
to withstand this, ignore it, and simply say, maybe like what Reagan said, right? Well, there they go
01:10:04.220
again, right? And just, and kind of shrug it off and say, well, this is what they do. This is how
01:10:10.160
they attack. And they're calling me a racist now. Well, they've done it to everybody. They did it to
01:10:14.840
Reagan. By the way, they're really doing that to Reagan now, right? So it's just, it's kind of what
01:10:21.040
they do. They're vicious about it. And I guess all we can do is maybe try to teach people to be more
01:10:29.960
How do you deal with that with teaching the youth? I mean, you're seeing what's going on with
01:10:33.200
China giving $400 billion to Iran, 25 year contract, okay, that they're going to get oil in return,
01:10:39.840
but at the same time, influence and education, influence and infrastructure, influence and,
01:10:45.300
you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then you're hearing about New York giving $15,600 to undocumented
01:10:54.260
immigrants who lost their work during the pandemic. And, you know, they're going to spend the state
1.00
01:10:59.500
budget of $2.1 billion to help them out. And they're raising taxes. Well, for the top line revenue,
01:11:05.580
officially, New York becomes the most expensive state to live in. It's no longer California.
01:11:11.140
California becomes the second worst, used to be the worst on taxes. How are some of these people
01:11:16.320
making these kinds of policies and making progress on them and people are buying into them? And the
01:11:21.380
job creators are sitting on the sidelines saying, well, you know what, I'm going to take it a little
01:11:24.700
bit more. Are you sensing the exodus actually taking place from some states? And some of these states are
01:11:30.480
really going to pay a big price, just like maybe they did in 1970, when half of the fortune 500
01:11:35.220
companies out of New York left and completely left to a different state. Do you see some states getting
01:11:40.040
crushed? Yeah, I do. And this is a whole other fiscal conversation about the bankrupting of
01:11:46.260
America. I mean, there's only so much longer that this kind of spending and this kind of debt can go
01:11:50.760
on. We've been saying that for a long time, but it's got to reach a tipping point at some point.
01:11:55.640
But also, though, too, to have those people then leave New York and California and go to states like
01:12:01.460
Texas and Colorado and Georgia, and then they come down and they bring their crazy voting
01:12:07.420
preferences with them, and then turn Southern states and Republican states into Northeastern
01:12:15.440
states. And in a place like Georgia, where corporations like Coca-Cola and even Major League
01:12:21.960
Baseball, an organization like that, starts politicizing everything. I mean, they have no
01:12:27.720
idea if the laws in Georgia are more restrictive than my home state of Pennsylvania. They're probably
01:12:32.640
not, right? Coke doesn't know that. Major League Baseball doesn't know that. But you get, again,
01:12:39.880
this kind of mob media platform, media mentality, this culture of intimidation, of cancel, and it
01:12:47.240
starts going after people and people get scared and they buckle. And I find that, to go back to what I
01:12:54.020
said, I find that one of the more disturbing things about America today in the 21st century.
01:12:59.460
I'm going to, we're at the last part of the interview. Paul, I'm going to give you names. It's
01:13:03.180
called Speed Run. Tell me one word that comes to mind. Okay. AOC. Democratic Socialist. I use two
01:13:09.740
words. Okay. Sanders. Socialist. Pelosi. Oh, boy. That's not easy. I'm trying not to be insulting. I was
01:13:23.040
going to pick a word that's insulting there. I, yeah. Yeah. I better, I shouldn't say what, I just
01:13:31.700
talked about charity, right? What, what, what I would say would not be positive about her, in my view,
01:13:39.940
mental acuity on, on, on, on certain policy issues. How about Biden?
01:13:44.780
I think he's the Trojan horse. Kamala. Yeah. Kamala. Yeah. President Harris. Obama.
01:13:56.640
Obama. Increasingly difficult to pin down. I'm starting to wonder, Patrick, if, if, if Obama,
01:14:04.780
almost like a Bill Maher type, is kind of moving a little bit more to the center as he gets disgusted,
01:14:10.620
watching the cancel culture and some of this other stuff go around him. But that's not a one word
01:14:15.280
answer, is it? Yeah. But, but it's very interesting. You're saying that because you wrote about his
01:14:21.140
mentor. Yeah. Frank Marshall Davis. Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. So, and his presidency, I think,
01:14:27.020
was a really bad turning point that, that I could show you by data that when they asked, they asked
01:14:34.600
young Americans every year, do you support socialism or capitalism? All right. It finally flipped to
01:14:40.120
socialism in 2010, right? A lot of this cultural revolutionary stuff happened under Obama.
01:14:47.800
Obama was really a break. The Obama presidency was a breakthrough period for the left that I don't
01:14:53.680
think we'll, we'll ever turn back from, even if Obama has some regrets, if he ever does about some
01:14:59.600
of what happened. Got it. So Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz. Great. Yeah. I think he's terrific. He's one of my
01:15:07.040
favorite senators. My favorite senators are Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul. JFK. Anti-communist
01:15:15.800
Democrat. Bill Maher. His party's no longer with us. I agree. Bill Maher. I, I, I appreciate his
01:15:24.180
independence. I can't watch his show because of the vulgarity and the other stuff, but I appreciate
01:15:29.840
somebody who's honest and, and, and is willing to, he's like Piers Morgan, right? Willing to say what,
01:15:37.560
what, um, willing to go against the politically correct on his side. Anderson Cooper. I actually
01:15:44.440
think he's pretty fair. I, I, um, yeah. Yeah. Tucker. Brilliant. And, and needs to continue to be
01:15:52.420
courageous. Be not afraid. John Stewart. Uh, yeah. He's a little bit like a Bill Maher and John
01:15:59.440
Stewart. I like, he's a nice guy. He doesn't have a mean edge to him. Trump. That would take another
01:16:05.180
entire show to adequately assess him, but turn policy wise turned out to be a much more conservative
01:16:16.520
president. And, and, and many of the policies that I thought he would never embrace in 2016. He did by
01:16:23.500
2020. Pence. Um, really nice guy. I don't think he'll ever be president though. DeSantis. Um, I think
01:16:33.220
he could be president and he's a really good governor. Well, I got to tell you, I've really
01:16:37.480
enjoyed this. Thank you so much for being a guest on Valuetainment. And we're going to put the links
01:16:41.320
to two of your books, which we talked about today, the devil in car marks. We're going to put the link
01:16:46.020
below as well as the crusader, Ronald Reagan and the fall of communism. And, uh, we'll put the links
01:16:50.940
for folks to be able to find you as well, whether it's your website or your social media platform.
01:16:56.100
Final thoughts here before we wrap up, is there any last words you got for the audience?
01:17:01.120
Well, I don't use social media, my Twitter account. I've never actually touched. So I got to warn you on
01:17:05.540
that, but yeah, my, my final, uh, my final advice would be educate, educate, educate. You might have to
01:17:12.380
self-educate yourself and all this stuff, especially if you go to our lousy universities
01:17:16.420
and have courage, have charity, be not afraid and try to be a cheerful warrior in this culture that
01:17:24.300
needs a cheerful warriors. Ronald Reagan was a cheerful warrior. I like that cheerful.
01:17:30.100
So are you Patrick? I appreciate that. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Thank you for
01:17:34.280
being a guest on Valuetainment. Thank you very much. God bless. Take care. God bless you as well.
01:17:37.980
You have no idea how much I enjoy watching interviews or doing interviews on topics of
01:17:41.740
economy. Like it's so fascinating to me. And some of you either love this stuff or some of you didn't
01:17:46.300
even make it all the way to the end. But if you did, I want to know what you took away from today's
01:17:50.320
interview. And if you enjoyed today's interview, there's two other interviews I want to recommend
01:17:53.320
watch either one of them that you want to watch. One of them was with Ray Dalio at the time when I
01:17:56.740
interviewed him, I think he was worth 18 billion. And we had a very, very deep conversation about
01:18:01.620
economy methods of thinking. China was a big part of it. You may enjoy this one. And if you've not
01:18:06.780
watched my sit down with Larry Arnn, Larry Arnn has a lot of similar philosophies to my guest
01:18:13.180
today. Paul, I think you would really enjoy the conversation with Larry Arnn as well. Having said
01:18:18.960
that, click on either one of them that you want to watch. And aside from that, have a wonderful day.