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- May 05, 2021
Why Is Karl Marx So Popular In Universities?
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 18 minutes
Words per Minute
170.59702
Word Count
13,376
Sentence Count
931
Misogynist Sentences
2
Hate Speech Sentences
18
Summary
Summaries are generated with
gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ
.
Transcript
Transcript is generated with
Whisper
(
turbo
).
Misogyny classification is done with
MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny
.
Hate speech classification is done with
facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target
.
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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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How would you define socialism?
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Common ownership of the means of production.
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So, historically, socialism, that's what it is.
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USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
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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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Possibly. I mean, Ronald Reagan said,
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if we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to.
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This is the last stand on Earth.
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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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But you get this kind of mob media platform,
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this culture of intimidation, of cancel, and it starts going after people.
00:00:47.920
And I find that one of the more disturbing things about America today.
00:00:52.640
And also, two people just aren't well-read.
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They're not taking the time to research things.
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But this is the kind of culture that we're in.
00:00:59.840
30 plus years after the collapse of communism,
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we should not be having the debate as to whether or not communism is bad.
00:01:06.960
And the fact that we are shows we're really in trouble as a country.
00:01:10.320
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,
00:01:28.880
a few months ago, thousand plus reviews on Amazon. It's been a big hit. It's called The Devil in Karl
00:01:33.280
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
00:01:54.240
in a great lineup of, but it's based on the book that my guest today wrote. With that being said,
00:01:59.280
Paul, thank you so much for being a guest on Valley Team.
00:02:01.040
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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Thanks.
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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
00:02:11.760
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,
00:02:22.080
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
00:02:35.840
having to do with different characters, but why the focus on Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan?
00:02:42.400
Well, that's a good question, Patrick. So I, it goes, it goes back to, I'd say my kind of formative
00:02:47.840
years in college. I was in college in the late 1980s. I went to the University of Pittsburgh,
00:02:54.000
where I, where I was pre-med and I, I worked for the organ transplant team at the University of
00:03:00.160
Pittsburgh. So I know you probably didn't expect me to say this, right? This to be part of my answer,
00:03:04.960
but, but I was, I, the Dr. Thomas Starzl was the organ transplantation pioneer. They did 80 to 90%
00:03:13.760
of the world's organ transplants at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s. So, so I was there,
00:03:19.200
right? This is, this is my life. This is my career. This is where I'm going. I'm going to go to medical
00:03:24.800
school. I, I, I worked 30 hours a week while I was in college for three years. And then when I graduated,
00:03:34.000
I worked full-time, did research on immunology, anti-rejection drugs, but it was 1988, 1989. And it
00:03:43.280
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,
00:03:56.320
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
00:04:15.040
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
00:04:24.320
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
00:04:46.800
on campus who I was told were, were liberals, right? And they were blaming the homeless problem
00:04:52.480
on Ronald Reagan. And I thought, how is this? What year was this? What year was this when you
00:04:58.400
wrote this? Just curious. So this would have been 1988, 1989. Got it. So the liberals are blaming Ronald
00:05:03.840
Reagan, homeless, continue. I'm sorry. Right, right. So, so I did a little research on it,
00:05:09.200
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
00:05:35.440
mentally ill. I don't know what they're teaching you at that university, right? Well, I know they're
00:05:40.800
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
00:05:52.080
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
00:06:04.960
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
00:06:21.680
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
00:06:34.080
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
00:06:58.820
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
00:07:13.300
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
00:08:41.060
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
00:09:02.960
liberal. The media would have to go there to record it versus today. How big of a difference is it
00:09:08.240
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
00:09:29.460
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.
00:09:39.920
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
00:09:53.280
something like, Favorite Columnist, which is like a sarcastic thing, right? Says Goodbye to Some
00:09:59.540
unthoughtful words, not with some unthoughtful words, to some unthoughtful words. And I went through
00:10:05.200
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
00:10:47.080
know, alacrity speed of protest, of organizing that you see today. But that stuff was out there
00:10:56.260
back then. And I remember too, one more, June 1989, two things in June 1989. The people of Poland held
00:11:06.080
free and fair elections, all right, which had been promised at Yalta in 1945, 44 years later, all right?
00:11:13.160
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
00:11:27.380
that they knew of on the student newspaper. And they said, we're looking to demonstrate. We're
00:11:32.780
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,
00:11:43.720
right? I mean, they're protesting arming the Contras. You know, they're protesting apartheid in South
00:11:50.200
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
00:12:02.100
paper bags over their heads to conceal their identities. They wore bandanas over their mouths so
00:12:08.180
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
00:12:42.740
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
00:13:26.800
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
00:15:00.320
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
00:15:11.520
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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that it should.
00:15:28.900
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
00:15:42.540
that. He says, I'm telling you they're coming. I don't believe every one of them is because we're
00:15:46.560
losing them. He says, everybody keeps saying. So anyways, we had a nice, interesting conversation
00:15:49.640
together on, because I agree with you on the fact that we're also labeling everybody. Not
00:15:53.600
everybody's in the same box. Second question for you on this side here. So for me, as a person
00:15:58.760
that's a business owner, I'm an entrepreneur. I have to always get to the bottom of the issue
00:16:01.980
because you can fix issues on the surface. It keeps reappearing, but you got to get to the
00:16:07.160
bottom of the route to figure out exactly why this issue keeps surfacing. So you said this
00:16:12.420
has been going on for a while. Okay. So I'm 42. Okay. I came to the States November 28th,
00:16:18.640
1990, which means I don't know pre-November 29th. Matter of fact, I didn't even follow
00:16:24.200
politics for quite some time. So go even past that, right? If this has been going on forever,
00:16:31.640
has this been going on forever as in since biblical times, pre-biblical times? Meaning, are we always
00:16:37.160
going to go through this 20 years from now, 40 years from now, 80 years from now, 300 years from
00:16:40.740
now, 800 years from, 1,000 years from now, because it's a cyclical cycle of one person makes the
00:16:44.760
money. The other one says it's unfair. He feels envious. Let's take the money and give it to
00:16:48.020
everybody else. So it's a constant pendulum that we'll go through and it's never ending. Or
00:16:52.520
is it any way different today than it was before 40 years from now, 80 years from now, 100 years from
00:17:00.300
now, 500 years from now, 500 years ago? Well, I do think it's worse now than ever, and it's getting
00:17:06.360
worse. But like, for example, yesterday in class, I teach a course on Marxism. We're talking about the
00:17:12.220
Hollywood 10 and every single member of the Hollywood 10 was, was a, was a member of Communist
00:17:18.640
Party USA. We had their five digit Communist Party USA numbers. In fact, they were presented before the
00:17:25.540
members of Hollywood 10 when they were speaking to Congress, October and November, 1947, House
00:17:31.700
Committee of Non-American Activities. John Howard Lawson, who was one of the worst of them, when he
00:17:37.000
was called in to testify after telling all of his liberal friends in Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren
00:17:42.020
Bacall, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, some of these wonderful actors and actresses, who, by the
00:17:50.240
way, were liberals, right? They were not communists, right? They were progressives. But he was telling
00:17:54.340
them, I'm not a communist. These right wing fanatics in Washington, I'm not that. I'm not. I'm like you.
00:18:01.200
So he got up there and he testified before Congress and they said, Mr. Lawson, here on
00:18:05.800
this billboard, here on this poster board, here's your Communist Party USA number. Here's
00:18:11.620
all the checks you wrote out to Communist Party USA. Here's your dues. Here's your application.
00:18:16.620
And John Howard Lawson, Patrick, you know what he did? He kind of stirred in his seat and
00:18:20.300
he yelled, Nazis, right? This is like, this is like the Reichstag fire in Berlin. He just
00:18:28.960
started calling him names, right? He just started calling. And these guys, all that they had done
00:18:34.820
was expose them as being a communist. So what did he do? He called them all these names. Probably
00:18:39.800
would have called him a homophobe if that name had existed back then, right? So you see this among
00:18:44.840
the kind of extreme left for quite some time. I'll go back a little further. Karl Marx, I spend a lot
00:18:52.220
of time on this in The Devil and Karl Marx. Marx and these Marxists like to say that business people
00:18:59.120
are capitalists who are obsessed with money, right? No, guys like Marx and Marxists and communists,
00:19:08.340
they're the ones who are obsessed with money. That's all that these guys think about. You read some of
00:19:14.240
Marx's anti-Semitic statements. They are chilling, right? He says things like, what is the worldly
00:19:20.680
God of the Jew? Money. What does the Jew worship? Haggling. And I read that and I think to myself,
00:19:28.340
no, Karl, you're the one that worships money, right? You're the one that's obsessed with money.
00:19:33.920
You're so obsessed with money that you can't even think enough about your own money. You think about
00:19:39.060
everybody else's money, right? You want a central government to come in and forcibly take it and
00:19:46.020
redistribute it. So it's funny. Oftentimes when they're yelling at you, hater, screaming at them,
00:19:52.000
and you're thinking, I'm not hating at all. I've got a smile on my face while you're talking to me.
00:19:56.540
They're projecting onto you what they're really feeling. And they do that a lot with money and
00:20:03.320
attacking people with property and attacking capitalists. A lot of this is a sort of self-projection.
00:20:09.560
And it's almost psychological by some of these individuals. Paul, what was communism called
00:20:14.000
pre-communism? That's a good question. And I had a professor in graduate school who used to like to
00:20:21.160
say that the Jacobins were the first communists, right? And so the Jacobins, of course, were there
00:20:28.000
in revolutionary France, beheaded 40,000 people by guillotine in one year between 1793 and 1794.
00:20:35.860
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
00:20:49.480
laugh about, right? Nothing to laugh about. But Marx and Engels in 1848 published the Communist
00:20:55.200
Manifesto. And the Communist Manifesto was the official programmatic statement or manifesto
00:21:02.540
of the Communist League in that day, which was made up of about 48 people, all Germans, all men,
00:21:09.560
with the exception of Marx's wife. I think she was the only woman in the group. So at that point in
00:21:14.120
time, and people have tried to pin down who first used the word communism. The great Richard Pipes,
00:21:20.680
the Harvard historian, said that he believed it was coined in Paris in the 1840s. I don't know
00:21:27.420
exactly for sure. But Marx and Engels met in Paris in the 1840s. And they published the Communist
00:21:34.340
Manifesto in 1848.
00:21:36.340
Got it. So now, before we talk about Karl, before we talk about Reagan, let's focus on Karl here.
00:21:42.480
So who was Karl growing up, family, parents, upbringing, school? How was he in school? What
00:21:50.740
stories do we need to know about him that influenced him to become who he ended up becoming with writing
00:21:55.820
the book with Engels' Communist Manifesto?
00:21:57.720
Yeah, he was born in Trier, Germany, May 5th, 1818. So Trier is spelled like Trier, T-R-I-E-R.
00:22:04.720
And it was one of the most religious cities in all of Germany, very heavily Roman Catholic. In fact,
00:22:11.600
the ancient cathedral in Trier was built in the 320s. The 320s, not the 1320s, the 320s, around the year 330.
00:22:20.820
And it was built, financed by Helena, St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, of all things, who made a
00:22:28.760
pilgrimage to the Holy Land and came back with all sorts of artifacts. She believes that she found
00:22:36.420
the actual cross that Christ was crucified on, the actual crown of thorns, which to this day
00:22:42.780
allegedly is the cross of thorns that's in Notre Dame, in Paris. And she even believes that she
00:22:51.740
found the holy robe, which was the robe that Christ wore on the way to the crucifixion that the Roman
00:22:57.960
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?
00:24:46.020
Oh, yeah.
00:24:46.980
What was the follow-up? What happened?
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?
00:34:14.720
I don't, I've never seen that.
00:34:17.180
Okay. Just curious.
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
00:36:23.480
state of things.
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
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.
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
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.
00:44:28.920
What does that mean? Yeah.
00:44:31.100
What does that mean? One political party, communist, government is communism. What does it mean?
00:44:35.160
Government is communism.
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.
00:46:04.960
And it's totally unlike North Korea or Cuba.
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.
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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,
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,
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
01:10:26.860
respectful of one another. But good luck.
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
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.
01:18:23.500
Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.
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