American Thought Leaders - How Marxism Exploits Crises and Division: Mike Gonzalez and Katie Gorka

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

What is the connection between the anti-Israel protests we are seeing today and the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri? Is there a link to the French and Bolshevik revolutions?“The reason they tell you there’s systemic racism is because if you believe that, then the only logical conclusion is you must have a completely systemic overhaul,” says Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “It’s not about improving the lot of anyone. It’s about power.”And what do these have to do with the industrialization of the West and America’s Great Society programs of the 1960s?“It was those programs that disadvantaged the family, and I think that’s really at the heart of the problem,” says Katie Gorka, chair of the Fairfax Republicans in Virginia.In this episode, I sit down with Gorka and Gonzalez to discuss their new book, “Next Gen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

This is fundamentally the Marxist perspective. They divide the world into two and they say these two sides are irreconcilable. That they are so fundamentally opposed to each other that one has to be destroyed and one has to take power. What is the connection between the anti-Israel protests we are seeing today and the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri? Could there be a link to the French and Bolshevik revolutions? In this episode, I sit down with Katie Gorka and Mike Gonzalez, authors of Next Gen Marxism, What It Is and How to Combat It. Why are people taking to the streets to support an organization, Hamas, which has just committed

the biggest murder of Jews since the gas chambers. And the reason for that is very clear. They're answering the call of an ideology that boils everything down to this epic struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, which is in the first page of the manifesto. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Katie Gorka, Mike Gonzalez, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you. Since basically October 8th, there's been very prominent protests across campuses,

frankly, across downtowns of multiple cities. And these protests are portrayed as being spontaneous popular uprisings of the people and and you don't think that's the case the reason Katie and I wrote this book next gen Marxism is to connect the dots for you and the reader as to how these things are connected how are the anti-Israel protests and riots that have wrecked life on our campuses and our cities this year. How are they connected to Ferguson? How are they connected to Black Lives Matter, one of the revolutionary agents on the ground that tries to implement next-gen Marxism?

They're all connected. And there's even a foreign connection here with these new protests. A lot of these, well, as Katie always likes to remind me, all these South American and Marxist governments, fully supportive, Black Lives Matter has met and has taken part in congresses of the Four de Sao Paulo, which is the group of South American Marxists. But later, you have such groups as the Answer Coalition or the People's Forum. These are groups that have been paid for with money that was made

by an American multimillionaire by the name of Neville Roy Singham, who just happens to live in Shanghai. He's closely connected to entities that are very close to the Chinese Communist Party. He is married to Jody Evans, who is one of the co-founders of Code Pink, which is an organization that also creates and organizes protests and riots. And she's now writing a book about what a great ally China is. You know, I'll just mention that, you know, Code Pink is notable. I've been at a number of meetings of the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party in the buildings very close to us here. I don't think there's been a single time that I've been at one of those that Code Pink hasn't, at the beginning, tried to disrupt the meeting. Yeah. Somehow they think that America is oppressive, but China is no problem.

So what's the tie-in to Ferguson? I remember years ago, it's now I think almost four years ago, that I had Shelby and Eli Steele, they made the amazing film What Killed Michael Brown, and just tried to explore, you know, what are the realities around that situation? And even today, a lot of people don't know. Okay, let me preface this by saying that manufacturing riots has been a strategy of the radical left since the 1960s. So one of the things that we talk about in our book, Next Gen Marxism, is the fact that you had students for a democratic society in the 1960s, a Marxist group, radical group, wanted to fundamentally change America. They went into some of America's inner cities,

including Newark. They spent two to three years in these cities, both fomenting discord, but also teaching the tools of revolution and actually providing training in using arms and Molotov cocktails. They brought in trainers. They actually taught people how to use these weapons. So our inner cities exploded in 1967. And again, at the time, many people thought, oh, this was just spontaneous discontent with the plight of inner city blacks. But in fact, no, it was all completely manufactured. It was completely organized. This is what we are seeing again today. So repeatedly with these various sort of riots that we've seen and protests that we've seen in this country, starting with Ferguson, but going

right on through the Black Lives Matter protests as well, right up until these anti-Israel protests on our Matter, she was sent to Ferguson to kind of stir things up and to turn it into something bigger than it really was. You've done more research on this. Yes. And you mentioned using crisis. There was somebody who was at Ferguson, who was at Hamilton Hall in Columbia in April of this year, who was in Seattle in 1999 as Lisa Fithian, who actually has a phrase on that. She says, I manufacture crises. Wow.

Crisis is the inflection point. Yes. So crisis is very important to communism, Marxists, as a way to manipulate, to create problems. So what Katie was referring to was the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is created in Atlanta at the founding conference of the U.S. Social Forum. The creation of a U.S. beachhead is called for by Venezuela's Hugo Chavez a year earlier at an annual conference in Caracas of the World Social Forum. He says we need to establish a U.S. beachhead and lo and behold, a year later, we do have

the U.S. Social Forum created in Atlanta. Who is there? Alicia Garza, Patrice Coulours, Paul Tometi, Eric Mann, Harmony Goldberg. These are the people, either the founders of BLM or the people who have instructed them into Marxism. Who were graduates of Students for a Democratic Society, let's not forget. Right, exactly. Eric Mann sets time in prison for assault and battery. The National Domestic Workers Alliance created in Atlanta sends its special projects director, Alicia Garza, into Ferguson. She gives a lot of interviews. And in

the interview, she says, look, we use Ferguson to organize. So Black Lives Matter had been around for a year. By the time of Ferguson, it's exposed into riots because they manipulate the tragedy of Michael Brown's death. It is at Ferguson that they begin to say, hey, this needs to be chiseled into organizations, organizations that can receive donations, organizations that can organize protests. And then we have, obviously, 2020, six years later, and this organization that is created, the Black Lives Matter Global Metaphor Foundation, receives a hundred million dollars worth of donations after George Floyd because of something that is very thought ahead in advance. Well and so the thing that's I think also

important though is you said they're completely manufactured protests but they're kind of capturing something that's in society and they're taking advantage of it, right? They're capturing, in most cases, like a feeling or an unrest or a discomfort or, you know, outrage. Is that right? It's not completely manufactured, but leveraged or something like that. No, I think that's very fair. And when you talk to people who were active, for example, in the 60s, because this is where it really starts, right? It starts with the student radicals in the 60s. And there was a very valid concern at that time with the treatment of black people and the failure at that stage for the civil rights movement to have really brought

about the reforms that people want. So, yes, I would agree with that. And I think, you know, that there is, there has been a very legitimate and real discontent with what people see as the fact that, let's say, you've got black people in this country still living in poverty, right, or still living under difficult circumstances. But I think the important distinction to make is that what I would call the American way, what I would call the principles of the American founding, is that we fundamentally believe that we as Americans can work together to improve the situation, to solve our problems, to make things better, right? What you have with the student radicals of the 60s, with today's

radicals of Black Lives Matter, they do not think that we can work together. This is fundamentally the Marxist perspective, right? They divide the world into two, and they say these two sides are irreconcilable, that they are so fundamentally opposed to each other that one has to be destroyed and one has to take power. They are very good at taking an existing sort of concern or discontent and utterly exacerbating it and manipulating it to turn it into sort of a cause for conflagration. Okay, you're absolutely right. There's a long history of slavery, Jim Crow, which is very important. And then you have the racial disparities.

But there's the use of white guilt. And you have a great expression that I have used since, I think you call it misplaced compassion, is that it? Yes, yes, yes. And it's funny that Nicole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project spoke explicitly of using white guilt, you know, and what you call misplaced compassion, because all of us, you and me, I know for a fact, are very much energized. We want to do something about the disparities. But for that, we need to do the hard work of what really causes it.

What are the background variables that lead to disparities? Broken homes, bad education, not access to jobs. But it's a leap that the other side takes, which says, no, the disparities are ipso facto evidence that there is systemic racism. Yeah. And it also troubles me. It is so fundamentally racist, the perspective that they've taken, because what they're saying is to be black is by nature to be impoverished or to be disadvantaged. And then conversely, it's to say it's to completely ignore anybody who's white or Hispanic or any other ethnicity who might be poor.

That is what the EIA does, which is to say we must take from the white sharecropper because he's white and give to the Hispanic neurosurgeon because his last name is Gutierrez. Even if his eyes are blue, he's blonde. And that is just nonsensical. Let's go back. I mean, you do an amazing job in next-gen Marxism of kind of charting the course of how it shifted. Because you talked about how that evolved, which is, I think, a substantive portion of what you covered.

Yes, I think that actually Marx was the original limousine Marxist. I don't think he ever really met. There's no evidence that he rubbed elbows with the proletariat, that he was on a factory floor. He spent all his life either with activists or at the London Library doing research or badgering Engels for money or his parents for money or cheating on his wife.

And Katie talks a lot about what a bad life he led. But what ended up happening, and we saw it in history, is that the working man turned out to have no interest in all the things that the manifesto and other Marxist writings call for, especially the dissolution of the family, the dissolution of God, of the nation-state and private property. You know, the worker liked his wife and children. The worker at that time was usually a man, although women did a lot of work as well, a lot of labor. The worker liked what little property he had. He wanted to have more of it. He wanted to become middle class. The worker was very patriotic and the worker worshipped God. And so it really took a generation or two generations

later after the failures to install Marxist revolutions in Western Europe for people, for Marxist intellectuals in Germany and Italy to come up with ideas like, hmm, I wonder what's going on here, and that's when they did turn into cultural Marxists. And the same thing happened here when these German intellectuals came to this country in the 60s. They were very disappointed and wrote about it, wrote about the disappointment with the American worker in Ohio, Michigan, and the factory worker here. And Howard Zinn also writes, saying, we can now rely on

the American worker. He's a really bad, bad revolutionary. And that's when they happen upon, and this is, I think, the leap to next-gen Marxism, which is a phrase that Katie and I introduced, that places the revolutionary locus on the members of the marginalized groups, whether they're racial or sexual or body disability or whatever, and they are supposed to be the locus of revolution. And so how did that happen exactly? How did that shift happen?

So I would say the first very big important turning point came in the late 1950s. There was a rejection, a full rejection at that stage with the death of Stalin of Soviet-style communism, right? That's when we finally said, OK, the workers are not going to revolt the way we want them to. How can we bring about the revolution? And the solution that was offered is that the new revolutionaries will be intellectuals, but even more importantly,

it will be students. And remember, I think this was one of the most fascinating things that I learned was the fact that Harvard University welcomed Fidel Castro just less than a year after he brought about the revolution in Cuba. That was the birth of the student movement. That took place really of the student movement. That took place really through the 1960s. So you get to the end of the 1960s. You have this pretty substantial movement of

radical students, absolutely Marxist, being influenced by members of the Frankfurt School who had come to this country after communism failed in their own countries, people like Herbert Marcuse. And Katie, and just a little bit about what the Frankfurt School was. Yes. So very, very quickly, following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, right, there was a feeling across the globe amongst revolutionaries, this is going to sweep across the world now. And we will have successful communist revolutions everywhere. Two countries where it actually went quite far

and in fact came quite close to succeeding were Italy and Germany. But at the last minute, these revolutions failed. As Mike said, enough workers said, no, we like our jobs. We like our lives. We don't want to overthrow what we have. Some of those revolutionary leaders from Germany, they had to flee because their communist revolution failed. And so they formed what was called the Frankfurt School. So these were people with communist Marxist aspirations where it failed in their own country and they wanted to figure out why. And where do they find a home? The United States. Columbia. In our universities, including Columbia University. But to be fair, there were Marxists here from as early as the 1850s. They were just a very small minority, right? So you have this shift that happens in around 1958, 1959.

Students will be the new agents of revolution. So you have this kind of student revolutionary movement throughout the 60s. They get to the end of the 1960s and they start to feel that they have failed. They have not brought about the collapse of the American system. They have not brought about Marxism. They have not brought about the collapse of the American system. They have not brought about Marxism. They have not brought about the end of the Vietnam War. And they have not brought about the changes in civil rights that they wanted to. So they kind of went three different directions. One group said, we weren't radical enough. Let's go full terrorist. That was the

weather underground and series of bombings and all kinds of things that they did. Another group said, we were not well enough organized. We have to go out and better organize ourselves. And so they created things like the Midwest Training Academy. And then a group of them went into the universities and said, if we're going to fundamentally change this country, we have to change it through the law. And so they created what was called legal studies. So you had these mostly white law professors training up for over a number of years their students. Now, the students were increasingly diverse, but it was not being reflected in the hiring of professors. So you had primarily all white professors with

very diverse students. And you reach a point in 1989 where these students say, enough is enough. Time for the white men to step aside. Time for us to take over. You white men, you don't need to talk about civil rights anymore. We're taking over. And that year was the birth of critical race theory. So that's, in a nutshell, that's how the transition happened. And they were all members of the critical legal studies. The first member of the Harvard Law faculty, Derrick Bell, who's the godfather of critical race theory? Most people are familiar that critical race theory exists. They're less familiar with the idea there's critical race theory. Most people are familiar that critical race theory exists.

They're less familiar with the idea there's critical legal theory, but just like critical theory itself. What was that? There's a similar thread through all these variants of critical theory, or these sort of silos of critical theory. Very, very, very simple terms. Let's destroy a culture. Destruction is the key

thing for Marxists. Now, if you want to get more technical, it was an essay written by the third director of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer. He leaves Germany in 1933 after Hitler becomes chancellor, and Columbia, one of my alma maters, offers them a perch at Teachers College where John Dewey had taught. So all these things are connected. So Horkheimer writes traditional theory, it upholds society, makes sure that we continue to have a system in which the rich remain rich and the powerful remain powerful. And critical theory is an attack on all this, an attack on all

the givens of society and to kind of destroy them from within, destroy the foundations of society. And that is, you know, Katie gave you a very good description of critical legal studies and critical race theory, which are the American children, the American child and the American grandchild of critical theory. They all say we come from critical theory. You know, they all acknowledge that they owe an intellectual. In fact, in the name itself, it's critical legal studies and critical race theory. They're not hiding anything.

Critical theory is, to me, is fundamentally opposed to the American way. It's like the French Revolution. It's the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. OK, the American Revolution said we are going to take the traditions that we brought from England, that these evolutionary improvements to the law, to our rights as individuals. And we are going to build on that in the American system. Critical theory is like the French Revolution. It says we are going to delete, we are going to erase and utterly destroy the past. And we are going to start new. So this is the fundamental problem with critical theory.

It is absolutely opposed to any kind of gradual change. Critical legal studies, for example, wanted to eradicate the American legal system and create a new legal system. It is not just one lens. It is a radical approach to the world that says the only way forward is to destroy the past. And don't forget, the way the French Revolution was carried out was you destroyed not only the past, but you destroyed whole pockets of the population that were associated with the old system, right? They killed off the aristocracy. They killed off the priests and the nuns. Thousands. They decapitated thousands. They killed off landowners. And honestly, you know, this is what the proponents of critical race theory want today. They want to kind of erase what they see as the oppressor,

the white sort of property owners, right, the white privileged people, and they want power for themselves. Just to keep on talking about the French Revolution, they actually even get rid of the calendar, and they replace it with a decimal calendar. Who are these critical theorists? They are German, and they're Hegelians. And so they are, it's this dialectics, and this is the difference, Katie this is the difference. Katie talks about the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. I also talk about the difference between the Socratic dialogue and dialectics. Socratic dialogue, you have thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

So you have one argument, the other argument, and then you try to crunch the two of them and come up with common ground ground and you have the synthesis. In dialectics you have one side and the other side and this side must destroy this one. And that's what you have. And in fact I forget his name, but it was somebody who came in and gave a very good lecture at Harvard in the early 30s saying what's coming it's going to create havoc because it's dialectics and it really looks at the world in a very different way. It looks to dismantle the other side.

World War II was the fight of the Hegelians. You have the Nazis, which are the right Hegelians, and the Communists in the Soviet Union, which are the left Hegelians. Luckily, we Americans and the Western Europeans who are not hegelians at all also took part in one and were democratic. But it's an idea that's completely alien to the American thinking.

It is about juxtaposing one group, one oppressor class and an oppressed class, and one must destroy the other. This is why every time socialism has been instituted, in its wake comes waves of destruction and death, because it's not about people living together. It's not about tolerating different beliefs or different points of view, which again, is at the heart of the American system, right? We are not saying everybody has to be conservative or everybody has to believe in the free market. You know, the United States has been set up in such a way that it's incredible, actually, the diversity of belief that we tolerate. And when we're functioning better,

the types of dialogue that can go on and the fact that you have an electoral system where you can sort of go back and forth between a more left leaning and a more right leaning, and you can try this and try that and see what works best. The socialist model, this model that we're talking about, is all about saying, no, we destroy what came before, and we are starting with a blank slate and creating something entirely new. And you can't do that. When they did it with the French Revolution,

it led to not just massive amounts of death and destruction, but it led to decades, decades of chaos in France. I've looked at these polls that tell me that a lot of younger people are very sympathetic to socialism. But I don't think that they think of it the way you just described it at all. They think of Norway or Sweden or something, or how those countries work. They think of universal health care, like in Canada, for example, a big safety net for people where they're not sort of cast out and have to live in poverty. So can you kind of square that a bit for me? When you're talking about socialism,

is that communism? What are these other things? Okay, yes, I understand your point. And I have a very knowledgeable friend who says we shouldn't really even use the word socialism. We should use the word communism. But I'm going to push back against that. I'm going to argue that what Canada has, what Norway has, Sweden, is really social democracy. I would not call it socialism. And I think that the reason so many of our American youth have been sort of sucked in by this is for the same reasons that many of our best intellectuals in the 1930s and in the 1920s actually thought communism was going to be a good thing. We see chaos in the world, right? It's inevitable. We see shortages. We see scarcity. I mean, there's, you know, the world is not an easy place, right? Everybody's always looking for a better way to live. And many people really believed that communism would

present a kinder, gentler way of organizing an economy. How great that people, nobody should have need, that everybody should have sort of an equal amount. But the point that the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek made, which was so, so important, he was the first one to really make the statement and to deliver it up in a way that people could understand it. Was he said, the problem is, if you're going to control the economy to such a degree that you're going to have that kind of, you know, equitable distribution, you have to control everything. Because the economy is not something that stands alone by itself, right? This is all wrapped up in every aspect of our lives. The fact that you have to control every aspect of a person's life, that's the problem. And that's what young people today aren't

understanding. There's a Hungarian economist named Janos Kornai, and I read his autobiography. He explained why communism was so attractive to him. He was a young Jewish man in Hungary in the 1930s. He'd experienced anti-Semitism. He said, here's the first group that doesn't see me as separate for being Jewish. And so he became a communist. What turned him around, what kind of woke him up to the reality of communism was when friends of his who had also been good communists started coming back from the gulags and telling the stories of the incredible ways that they had been tortured and other fellow communists had been killed. People can have this dreamy idea about what socialism could be like, but they are going to wake up to the reality.

And I think it's already happening. I think the corruption that you saw in Black Lives Matter is absolutely endemic of communism. It's an very, very inequitable system. And I think our young people are going to be up for a harsh awakening. Somebody looking at what happened in Israel on October 7th and then the next day on October 8th and the day after that October 9th and 10th they see a bunch of young kids and their professors taking the side of the mass rapists and murderers and denigrating their victims. This doesn't make any sense.

Why are people taking to the streets to support an organization, Hamas, which has just committed an atrocity, the biggest murder of Jews since the gas chambers? And the reason for that is very clear and very simple, because they are answering the call of an ideology that boils everything down, all of human activity, all of human interaction, into this epic struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, which is in the first page of the manifesto. And it has assigned to Hamas the role of the oppressed.

And so if they're the oppressed, not only should they win, but they will win and all of their actions are to be forgiven. And they have assigned to the Israelis the role of the oppressor. And if that is the case, all of their actions should be denigrated and attacked. And the entity itself must be attacked.

That's why you get from the river to the sea, which implies a massive holocaust of all six million Israelis. And so that is our way of explaining to the average observer, who may be center-left or on the left, who is having some cognitive dissonance as to why young people and their professors are siding with mass murderers and rapists left who is having some cognitive dissonance as to why young people and their professors are siding with mass murderers and rapists and in in in in in ignoring most cruelly the plight of those of their victims this is why

because they have looked at the world through this paradigm and they now see everything through this paradigm and this they now see everything through this paradigm. And this paradigm is sick and is wrong. I want to add one more piece. I think what's also really helpful today, this is part of the conversation today, is the difference between equal opportunity versus equal outcome.

So the American way is we believe in equal opportunity because we believe... And we strive to have it even when we haven't achieved it, we strive to have it. Yes, yes, we're always striving for it. What the progressive view is equal opportunity is not enough. We want equal outcomes. That sounds great in theory. What it means is that if you are a bad math student, you might still be able to get a C or a B because we've actually shifted our grading system so that people can have more equal outcomes. But it also means that their excellence in, let's say, science or English will be erased, right? Because you can't stand ahead of others.

How do you actually achieve equal outcomes without cutting everybody's legs off? You can't. And this rejection of excellence is very detrimental to society. I want my teacher to be excellent. I want my children's teachers to be excellent. I want my president to be excellent.

I want the architect and the engineers who create buildings and the bridges and tunnels that are gone to be excellent. I want my president to be excellent. I want the architect and the engineers who create buildings and the bridges and tunnels that are gone to be excellent. This theory can only be admirable in a very superficial way, but it does not survive the barest of scrutinies because equal outcomes is completely unjust. If I sleep all day and you wake up in the morning and you turn the lights on and you work at the office all day and you turn the lights off and I don't do a lick of work, under what idea in the world should you and I have the same outcome? Yeah and what I find so interesting is this is

really galvanizing our immigrants, especially. So I live in Fairfax County, which 30 percent of our residents were born in another country. We have many like extremely successful people from from that have come here from other countries. And I'm telling you right now, they are increasingly upset because they came here. They have instilled in their children the notion that if they work hard, they can get ahead because they couldn't do that in their home countries. You can't do that in China. You can't do that in Cuba. You can't do that in Venezuela. And I'm telling you, our immigrant communities are up in arms, and I think that they're the ones who are going to fight for these, quote, American principles harder than anybody.

I've read, I think probably I could say a ton of literature on this, that a big reason why people come here is because they believe that they can change their social standing, by whatever means. It's almost like meritocracy is in the crosshairs of this ideology. And why would that be? I wouldn't say it's just social standing. I mean, I came here. I came here as a very young teenager.

You come here for opportunity. You have all these government benefits. There's other people coming that are attracted to government benefits. And I wouldn't reject that notion. But the original idea is to come here because you have opportunity here in this country, and you can realize the American dream. I think you're having a coalition of people who are pro-merit and pro-excellence, who may be center-left, may

not agree with me on social issues, may not agree with me on taxes, for example, but agree with me on the fact that this is crazy. Nobody is against it. I think we have a societal consensus for needs-based help. The government should be able to help those who are truly needy, who have fallen through the cracks. But to help somebody blankly because they belong to a group, be it sexual or racial, well, it's illegal, first of all. And they're losing in court because it's illegal. Going back to this, it's kind of war on meritocracy.

It is a war on meritocracy. It is a war on meritocracy, yes. They're very open about that fact. Again, they say that meritocracy is a failure, the meritocracy does not work, that we don't have meritocracy in this country, that what we have is white supremacy. Capitalism rewards the wrong elements of society, the wrong traits, and that we need to move beyond capitalism. Because by rewarding, for example, hard work or

punctuality, these are not virtues. These are traits and practices associated with whiteness. It seems really bizarre to, I think, probably most people that one would make that association. Like, what does that even mean? But again, I think you have to go back to the roots of this. And this is why we felt so strongly about calling this Marxism. Because there are a lot of people who say, no, this isn't really Marxism because this isn't about the fight about between the worker and

the owners but it is fundamentally Marxist and there's a couple of things about it. Marxism above anything was the politics of envy. It really was. If you read the history of Karl Marx's life he was the worst layabout you can imagine. He sponged off of everybody. He alienated his own parents. He never wanted to work and he created a world view around it. Marx was writing at a time in the world when there was a lot of instability because many many people had been drawn from the countryside, had been drawn away from agriculture into work for these new factories because you've got the industrial industrialization starting to happen. So you had a lot of poor

living conditions. You had a lot of instability. Based on theory, he said, oh, the owners are exploiting the workers and this will never change. What he failed to recognize is that actually capitalism itself solved the problem, right? Throughout the 1900s, the status throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s, the conditions of workers steadily, steadily improved. And the owners of the factories realized they could not do their work if they did not have a workforce. They had to find a way to create and keep a workforce and keep them happy, relatively happy and healthy. So but you have these holdovers. This is the problem. You have these holdovers from the original conception of what Marxism was that sort of feed into this view today.

And again, I'm just going to say, I think it is a fundamentally flawed, erroneous worldview. The same thing happened in Asia as these countries began their industrialization processes. Korea, Taiwan, the dragons, the four dragons in the 80s. And I was able to see that. I was able to see it myself, report on it as a journalist, how much these countries met success by embracing capitalism. Even China, though it remained controlled by the Communist Party, economically it moved away from Maoism in the late 70s after his death, much to its benefit, the economic benefit.

Right. So let me just reiterate, right? So you saw very legitimate disparities of wealth when Marx was alive and writing right you saw these these new factory workers coming in from the country very poor very poor conditions and you had owners making money right from industrialization Marx said the only way you're going to get rid of that disparity is to overthrow the worker, the owners, and let the workers be the ones in power. And that doesn't work. What ended up happening was it was actually the free market system itself. It was capitalism itself that lifted the workers up and led to their

growing prosperity. So bring that up to today. It was a very similar situation because what happened with the 60s was you had a flood of black people coming up from the south, from agricultural settings, into the factories in the 60s. In the north. And in the north, into the factories in the north. But then those jobs started going away and you had people crammed into cities under poor conditions. So our student movement said, this isn't going to resolve itself on its own through the American system, through education and everything. They said, no, the only way it's going to resolve is if we go in and create revolutions and overthrow. But it was those revolutions were

utterly destructive to black people. It was the black people who suffered the most because they were the property owners in these inner cities. It took decades for those properties to regain their original value. In fact, Ferguson hasn't recovered yet. Yeah, Ferguson still hasn't recovered. So you look at where we are today and you say, well, you've got Black Lives Matter saying the only way we're going to improve the situation of black people is to, I don't even know what, cause a revolution, get rid of the family. Well, they say dismantle capitalism. They're very clear about it.

Yeah, dismantle capitalism. And I would argue everything we've ever seen in history says no. That doesn't work. It's the American system that works, that benefits all people. Alicia Garza has said black lives cannot matter under capitalism. Yeah. Even though that quite significant disparities remain I mean that's kind of the the subtext. Yeah but why the disparities? I mean we need to look at the disparities we're not

running away from the disparities. Disparities exist in everything from from educational attainment from median household income, imprisonment. But first of all, we have to take a look at the data. For example, if you disaggregate Nigerian Americans and Ghanaian Americans and West Indian Americans, they do well. Nigerian Americans do extremely well. They sometimes, their median household income, sometimes it varies year to year, but sometimes it is above that of white Americans. And look at, you know, Indian from the subcontinent Americans, their median household income is like $125,000 a year. They blow whites out of the water.

The median household income, I believe, is like $70,000 a year. So you have to say, well, what is happening there? You look at social sciences. What do social sciences say? As I said before, the background variables of family formation out of wedlock birth. And we don't have very, very good data on that. But what data we do have does point to that. And the divorce rate among Indian Americans and Chinese Americans is very, very, very low.

It is much lower among Nigerian Americans and Ghanaian Americans or West Indian Americans. So you begin to say how do we address this if we want to do really is diminish and eliminate the disparities and we all want to because it's just and it's the right thing to do then we need to be brave and courageous enough to address that in policy. In the 1960s, our government adopted what was a fundamentally socialist approach to fixing these inequities with the Great Society programs. What they actually did was they broke down the black family. It was those programs that disadvantaged the family. And I think that that's really

kind of at the heart of the problem. And so to have Black Lives Matter say that the way they're gonna improve the situation of black people is to destroy the nuclear family, it makes no sense. And it goes against everything that we've seen. All the data, at least that I've seen that's available, shows that growing up in a nuclear family is one of the biggest predictors of success in society that you can find. And that's, you know, more left-leaning researchers, more right-leaning researchers, and all sorts of other researchers.

It's super strong. For me, the saddest thing about what has happened with the whole Black Lives Matter debate and DEI and critical race theory is the whole conversation has been focused on one single thread, which is whites are fundamentally racist, blacks are fundamentally oppressed, and it has obviated any other more meaningful conversation. And I will say this, I actually think that there is room in our culture for having conversations about maybe feelings of guilt that white people have, or feelings of a, you know, disadvantage that black people have, then let's have those conversations. Let's have the conversations about what are the actual factors that might be leading to problems. But I feel

like all those conversations have been derailed because they've been taken over by this fundamentally Marxist line of argument which divides the world into two. That's why we wrote Next Gen Marxism. Because what this is, it's not about improving the lot of anyone. It's about power. Yes. It's about instituting a Marxist blueprint that people doing the central planning do very well. They have a lot of power

and they become very rich and they become very powerful. Patrice Koulouris calls for the dissolution of the court system, of the police, of the prison system. This is just creating havoc so you can have revolution and revolutionize the system. Katie, a final thought as we finish? Yes. Look how far America has brought us. And anybody can be unhappy about something that they're seeing in the country now. But there is no denying that I think the United States, as it was founded, has been really just an extraordinary story of success, of bringing prosperity to many, many people, of providing opportunities, providing freedom. You know, yes, we have these blots on our history. You know, yes, we had slavery. Yes, we had Jim Crow. Yes, we are not perfect, but nothing is. And I think we've done an extraordinary job. And I just would say, I think especially to our young people,

don't fall for the lies that are being fed to you, that we are fundamentally racist or that, you know, there is some socialist paradise that's going to be instituted in this country. Look anew at how much good the United States has brought about and and return to that you know that is our beacon of hope. The reason Katie Gorka and I wrote this book Next Gen Marxism is to alert our fellow Americans that what you're seeing is a systematic attempt to destroy your country and your culture. It is the reason they tell you there's systemic racism is because if you believe that then the only logical conclusion is you must have a completely systemic overhaul system is just a greek word for the way everything works they want to get rid of everything in your life the boy scouts your house the fair the country

fair uh not just the way the political parties schools schools, everything, this is totalizing. America has problems. No place on earth is ever going to be perfect. But this is pretty, pretty good. I've lived in seven countries at least a year. This is still what Abraham Lincoln promised, the best place for man on earth. Well, Katie Gorka, Mike Gonzalez, such a pleasure to have had you on. Our pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you all for joining Katie Gorka, Mike Gonzalez, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.