From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Is America Experiencing A New Wave Of Marxism?

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Many Americans have sounded the alarm on an evolving shift in what children are taught in schools to how political agendas have morphed across the country.   What’s been the catalyst of this drastic shift in American society? According to author and Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Mike Gonzalez, Marxism could be at the center of this unprecedented ideological shift.   Mike joins Sean and Rachel to discuss why he believes we're witnessing a wave of "NextGen Marxism" hit America, a phenomenon he describes as embodying 'cultural Marxism with 21st-century American features,' and what people can do to combat the movement.   Follow Sean & Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life, and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. Well, it's great to be back at the kitchen table. And today, Sean, we have a guest who we've had before, who we love. And that is Mike Gonzalez. I want to give you a little bit of his background. He's a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He writes on critical race theory, identity politics, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation, nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. He spent 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them reporting from Europe and Asia and Latin America. And he's just, if you want to know what this experiment is that's happening in America right now,

if you're a little confused by what the last, I would say, six, seven, eight years in particular has been, the person with the answers is Mike Gonzalez. He understands communism. He knows how it's morphed itself into this American version. And he can explain it. And we brought him in today to basically help us unpack that because you can't fight what you don't understand. So with no further ado, Mike, thank you for joining us today at the podcast.

First, let me tell you that I am honored beyond belief to be a guest at the Campos Duffy kitchen table. Well, we appreciate that. I do intermittent fasting, but I'm within the eight hours now. So, you know, bacon, anything you have, I can eat. We love it. Awesome. Well, the last time we had you on, we had a fascinating discussion, which, by the way, you can go back.

If you're listening, you can go back and listen to it. We talked about Marxism and how Marxism uses children and actually purposely sexualizes children in order to turn them into activists. It was a fascinating conversation. It's happening here, but it happened in history. You have a book coming out, Mike, about this new version of Marxism that we're seeing here in America. Why don't we maybe just start with you unpacking why you wrote this book and what the premise of the book is? Well, the title of the book is Next-Gen Marxism, what it is and how we can combat it. And yeah, I mean, that's a very good way to start this because the reason my co-author, Catherine Cornell Gorka, and I decided to write it was because we wanted to answer

the questions that Americans are asking. It's like, why is the country becoming unrecognizable? Why are we having, you know, teachers? And you brought up the sixth thing, and it's a good way to get into this with that. Why are teachers and librarians pushing these gender ideologies and these queer theories on young children? Why are librarians lying to parents about the smutty books they're showing to children very young? And, you know, those of us who believe that this shouldn't happen, you know, the left has been very successful at saying we want to ban books. We don't want to ban books. You know,

penthouse is not banned just because we have decided not to have it in elementary school libraries. This is just something that's very new that has emerged over the last barely two or three or four years. And now they talk about it, the left talks about it as if it's something that is an American norm, you know, like something that goes back to Mark Twain. So we wrote this book to say, what is behind all this? And just to the answer, basically, is that a lot of people, a lot of men and women who share some political beliefs that have to do with how to dismantle the United States, they've all agreed that sex, in fact, sex is not the only way to dismantle the country. But sex is a very, sex is a strong sexual urge that you can use to dismantle society, dismantle the family, and dismantle the country.

So, Mike, you're talking about next-gen Marxism. So, how is this Marxism different than the old Soviet Union, and how is it the same as the old Soviet Union? What are the parallels, what are the differences with what we're dealing with today versus what we've seen in the past? Sean, that's such a good question. Let's actually, to make it clear, how is it different from the old Marxism? The old Marxism as put down by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, laid down by Marx in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, and then Das Kapital or Capital of 1867, was heavy on economics. of 1867 was heavy on economics. You know, man's social class actually had to do only with his relationship with the means of production.

If you owned the means of production, you were bourgeois or an owner of capital, middle class. If you worked with the means of production, you were a factory floor, you were a proletariat, a working class person. And these two classes were at each other. And Marx said that the job of the pluritariet was to overthrow the bourgeoisie and he would be constantly doing it. That didn't happen. It just didn't happen. The Manifesto was penned in 1848 by Marx and Engels, his sidekick, his sugar daddy. And revolutions did not happen until 1917, the Soviet, the installation of the Soviet Union.

And then when German and Italian ideologues tried to do the same thing, try to do copycat revolutions in Germany and Italy, they fail. And they went away and they asked themselves hard questions. Why is Marx so wrong about all these things? And the answer is that the worker was not at all. Marx never knew workers, by the way. He was the original limousine Marxist. Right. Just one baby. Life in the library in London. So the worker was not, again, that was not going to do the things that Marx called for in the manifesto, like abolishing the family, abolishing the nation state, abolishing God.

So these Marxists then said it's the culture. They have learned these things from the rich and powerful. The rich and powerful created norms and traditions that were created just to keep themselves rich and powerful. And the workers have bought into this and they have to be dissuaded of this. They have to be indoctrinated. So that's cultural Marxism that emerges in the 1920s and flourishes here in America in the 1960s. That's cultural Marxism. Next-gen Marxism, and this is something that, you know, it's our term, but we're calling a phenomenon this, is cultural Marxism

plus the 21st century American features, such as using queer theory, such as the obsession with race. All of a sudden, once again in America, promotion and hiring depends on race. We thought we had moved away from that, such as the use of networks that span the globe, the use of social media, American organizing, which is really a feature of Sololinsky. So cultural Marxism plus these American features of the 21st century is next-gen Marxism. I hope that I've done that as clearly as possible. No, it very much explains it.

And some of these things overlap, right? very much explains it. And some of these things overlap, right? Feminism was a tool of the Marxist to, again, disrupt the family, convince women that they were unhappy in the home and needed to go into the workforce. So that overlapped. And then we have this gender theory. I guess the question I have is, the Marxists have been trying in America, you know, since the progressive era to have this impact. And yeah, they made small gains here and here and there and there up to the 60s. But we really saw this explosion of the fruits of Marxism, as you said, just in the last couple of years. And I've always been very curious, like right because because the american experiment of self-reliance and and sort of these wholesome values of of christianity and and and working together and

that sort of family unit all of that was this very embedded in in who we are as americans and our love of liberty which is the opposite of marxism and i keep scratching my head like why what happened and i'm going to tell you what I think it is. And I want you to tell me if I'm right. And I'm not, when I lay this theory out, I don't want you to think that I'm ignoring the gains that they made since the progressive era and through the sexual revolution of the 60s and so forth. But I think Obama is key to this. so forth. But I think Obama is key to this. Yeah, don't think you're wrong in the least. Obama himself was mentored by a well-known communist, Frank Marshall Davis, who fled to Hawaii. And Obama writes about him, calls him only Frank in his biographies. And then he lies about

it. He says that it's not Frank Marshall Davis, but then somebody finds a video that Obama made years ago in which he actually says, you know, this poet, Frank Marshall Davis, was my mentor in Hawaii as I was growing up, so it was Frank Marshall Davis. Yeah. He was friends with Obama's parents or grandparents or something, correct? Yes, he was. And Obama was introduced to the Chicago world,

the Chicago political world by Bill Ayers, whom we devote an entire chapter to. Because Bill Ayers, he epitomizes what happened to the students, the radical students in the 60s. Bill Ayers was a high school jock who goes to the University of Michigan, becomes an anti-Vietnam protester, then becomes a terrorist, joins the Weather Underground, fails miserably at that, realizes the message that I have been discussing here with you, that the only way to really change America is by grabbing hold of the institutions and then indoctrinating people, indoctrinating especially the young. So he becomes a, he gets a PhD in education. So to go back to the Soviet Union, because you're absolutely right that the Soviet Union tried really hard to communise us. My argument in this book is that the Soviet Union failed.

It failed miserably. It did not accomplish what it wanted to do. And we, you know, a lot of courageous men, I will include Richard Nixon when he was a unconstitutional means, all these people, and many more, many intellectuals, many, many intellectuals, M. Stanton Evans, Ed Fulner, really fought communism, and they succeeded. The Soviet Union ended. We did not become communist. In this new version of Marxism, they have been much more successful because they have infiltrated the institutions and indoctrinated people and they have been much vastly more more successful than the soviet union with his ham-fisted ways brezhnev and drop off uh stalin

ever were we'll be right back with much more after this the fox news rundown a contrast of perspectives you won't hear anywhere else. Your daily dose of news twice a day, featuring insight from top newsmakers, reporters and Fox News contributors. Listen and subscribe now by going to FoxNewsPodcast.com. So, Mike, what always intrigues me is, again, I know that if we have really smart people that have reached the heights of Wall Street or corporate America or government or Hollywood, obviously they've gone to these elite schools that are probably fairly woke and they've got a good dose of indoctrination. So I understand that. But I still can't wrap my head around how really smart people who are doing very well in America

that rely on capitalism to buy their mansions and fly their private jets, that they're actually the ones that are helping push and promote these Marxist ideas. And I guess my question is, do they readily understand that they're pushing an ideology that will completely remake America into something that's unrecognizable to us? Do they understand that? Or are they like, they're just pawns in a game, like, I want to get my own, and I'm not going to really pay attention to the means by which I have to get there. So, yeah, I'll do DEI. Yes, I'll buy into climate change. What's going on at the top echelons of Americans' business community and elites? The culture makers and the business mentality. So I don't get that part of it.

Why they would do this? So, Sean, all of the above. I mean, I could just walk away from the kitchen now because you guys have it. Look, it's all of the above. I mean, I could just walk away from the kitchen now because you guys have it. Look, it's all of the above. The East German apparatchik, the Cuban apparatchik of today, the Soviet apparatchik, a lot of them spouted Marxist nonsense while living and having beautiful dashas in the countryside and living sumptuously in dining on lobster in Havana today while the Cuban people starve and don't have any water or electricity.

That is not a bug of the system. That is a feature of the system. Why some smart people do that? And we see Jeff Bezos' ex-wife who's just, she's got a gazillion billions now, and she's using all this money, she's donating it to causes that will... Yes. And these are the results of capitalism. Mackenzie Bezos, this is his ex-wife who got billions, and she's like the biggest philanthropist of like the worst causes now, right?

Right. That's exactly the same thing with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation. Right. Right. That's exactly the same thing with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation. You know, Henry Ford, the third, walked away from the Ford Foundation, wrote a scathing letter saying these were the these were the gains of capitalism. And you're using it to to destroy capitalism. He wrote that in the 1970s, the same thing can be said of Mackenzie Bezos. So they are. Why? It might make the lessons. We've got to keep women out of these institutions we got to keep women out no yes no women out like there we go you know mike in the bolsheviks had the same thing it was the the rich children right in the

bolshevik revolution it's the same thing. The wives and their rich, spoiled kids who were advancing the Bolshevik Revolution that ended up killing a lot of the upper class, correct? Well, I mean, yes. Look at Cuba. The Castros, their father was a rich Spaniard.

A very wealthy Spaniard in Cuba. The owner of a lot of land. Che Guevara was the son of a wealthy argentine Che Guevara was himself a doctor now these were both you know both white people with a lot of privilege in in cuba but look there's two things two more things having discussed one is the power why do people do this one is is envy. The greatest crime in all of mankind was committed because of envy. So that's one element of it. But there's another one. A lot of these people, if you walk up to them and say, you're a next-gen Marxist, they'll laugh in your face. They'll say, I'm not a Marxist. It's the same thing with people who believe in deficit spending,

who believe in raising taxes to throttle growth, who have never heard of John Maynard Keynes, and yet they're Keynesians. And in fact, Lord Keynes himself said everybody in the world is acting today because of the ideas of some defunct philosopher or politician who came up with these ideas, and then he leaves them behind. People act accordingly, who came up with these ideas, and then he leaves them behind. People act accordingly, never having heard the name. So many, you were a politician, Sean, I don't mean to be offensive. You were a politician of some point.

You worked with many Keynesians who believed deeply in deficit spending, yet a lot of them did not know anything about John Maynard Keynes, right? So this applies the same thing to these Marxists today. Yeah, no, that actually makes a lot of sense so now okay so you've kind of laid out this is the next gen um marxist this is the moment we're in we're seeing the fruits of a lot of years of work and maybe the speeding up of things since obama and you know the installation of so many of his bureaucrats in the government, the deep state, who also agrees with a lot of this ideology. We're seeing a lot of the people who come, as Sean said, from these elite colleges who are who were indoctrinated over the last few decades now coming to power. And all of this stuff is happening. And there's

this remnant of Americans who still believe the, Constitution and we still believe in the ideals of the revolution. What are we to do now? How do we fight back? What is all this knowledge about who these people are? How can it help us to save America? Well, the good thing is, and I believe, you know, we have Burgess Owens here at Heritage a few weeks ago, and he said he had had cancer, but he was alive today because he was caught early. And he said he believes it's the same thing with these Marxist notions such as DEI, CRT, et cetera. I think he's absolutely right.

I think we have caught it early enough. The American people, so in 2020, the leaders of the cultural elites enacted and implemented a raft of cultural changes because they get intimidated by the 2020 BLM riots. The architects of BLM were deeply influenced by these ideas. They're Marxists, and they call themselves Marxists.

These are not Marxists. By the way, Mike wrote a whole book on BLM, which I highly recommend. Thank you. Buy my BLM, which I highly recommend. Thank you. Buy my next book, Next Gen Marxism, with Catherine Gorka. So I think the American people are fighting back vociferously. They disagree with this cultural agenda that has been implemented since 2020 and before.

What we need to do is help them do it. You can't very well tell somebody that works for a company in this great country, if HR comes to you and says you must put a sign on your desk that says I'm an ally, or you must meet with your affinity group, members of your race or ethnicity after work once a month, people cannot, we can't just say to these people, no, say no to HR because it could lose their job, right? Their careers could be terminated. Their lives could be terminated. What we need to do is advocate for policies that would make it illegal for companies to behave in this manner, that would make it illegal for schools to indoctrinate children,

that would make it illegal for American institutions to be acting this way, for museums to decolonize and to be trying to tell the American people who walked into the Smithsonian a bunch of lies about our history. We need to go back to sanity, and I think we're seeing sanity beginning to prevail, but we need to obviously, this is no time to do back to sanity. And I think we're seeing sanity beginning to prevail. But we need to obviously, this is no time to do a victory lap. We need to work really hard to make sure that sanity prevails and we beat this back. I hope you're right. This is about taking away your individual freedom. Taking away your rights is what this is about. And give those rights to people who you frankly don't know and probably don't agree with in these elite circles.

And I'm going to use the example of EVs, electric vehicles. Joe Biden came out with a tailpipe emission standards standard. In essence, in eight years, you're not going to be able to buy a gas powered vehicle. You're going to be forced into an EV, right? So we all, the picture is painted, Mike, and people don't want EVs. I mean, the EVs are stacking up like cordwood on dealers' lots. They're all buying the gas-powered vehicle, the combustion engine. And I wonder if this is going to be an issue in this election, that people say, you know what, Joe Biden's trying to or DEI or, you know, the digital

currency that's going to keep you, you know, compliant with the government rules and regulations. Do you think people are following this and willing to act today to save tomorrow? Yeah, I'm not sure that they are, but I don't see how they could not because one thing we know about the American people, there's a love affair with the automobile. Yes. The left is at war with the family car. Sorry, Sean, you wanted to say something? No, no, we are just agreeing 100%.

There's nothing that underscores freedom more than the automobile, Mike. You're right on. Right. Yeah, Europeans take trains. We get behind the wheel and drive. Right. The difference between us and them. So American.

Yes. So the left is at war with the family car. But this climatism, guess what? It's another front in the same fight that we're talking about. They say they hate capitalism because they say it consumes too many resources. Capitalism is ruining the planet. It consumes too many resources. Capitalism is ruining the planet.

They are on a warpath against capitalism. And one of the battles is the internal combustion engine and taking away the family car and the single family home and everything else that makes our lives worth living. But it's a – and guess what? Yeah, capitalism consumes a lot more resources than socialism because socialism is activistic. It doesn't function. It doesn't produce anything. It doesn't produce bread. It only produces bread lines.

So, but the good thing about capitalism is that it finds better ways to produce things. And somebody said something to me the other day. Both hawks and humans love chickens. The problem is with hawks only, there's fewer chickens. When humans love chickens, there's more chickens. We actually, if there's a demand, there will be a supply. So we consume more resources through capitalism, but we produce more resources. So this war, climatism, another front on the war on capitalism. Yeah.

It's also a climate agenda is a war on modern life. I mean, it's just so weird. Again, and that's why I understand Sean's question, because, you know, all the things we love about America, whether it's the freedom to go where we want to go, the freedom, you know, to buy what we want to buy and live and live these lives that are so prosperous. Everything that they're selling will take that away from us. And I'm just surprised that Sean is, as I'm sure you are, that they've gotten this far, so far as they have. You know what the answer to that, Mike, is? I look at California. California is at the forefront of this movement i think instead of trying to demonize california and push back on

california i think we should applaud california i think we should try to see california go all ev go all uh windmill go all you know solar panel and and use it as an experiment let us let us see what it looks like let's see how fast they fall so before this whole country goes down let's watch california go down first and then let us make a decision as a country do we all want to do that or do we actually want to go right yeah but but we try as conservatives to demonize them i think i think that's part of the problem let them go so i'm actually their stupid ideas because that's that's actually the only way we're going to save ourselves, I think.

I've actually said in the past that God provided us with laboratory experiments with East Germany and West Germany and North Korea and South Korea, and that we have the same people, same culture, same DNA. One was another failure. The other one is a complete success. So we can extrapolate that and say that California and Texas is another laboratory experiment. And we're seeing that already with Californians voting with their feet. They do not want to live in Gavin Newsom's dystopia. And they're leaving, especially the

wealth creators are leaving and they're moving to Texas. So we should ask ourselves, why is that? You know, people are not stupid people come to this country for a reason people go to Texas for a reason which and I agree with you Sean let Gavin do whatever he wants yeah we had that experiment on a national level too Mike where we saw what you know it seemed like prior to Trump Republicans were sort of fighting for free markets in in theory sort of in like that paul ryan theoretical way and charts and graphs and then with charts and graphs and you know you know ayan ran and all this stuff it's like trump came in deregulated things that needed to be deregulated uh said no we're going to put tariffs on things that you know we're not gonna

let the chinese whip our asses um and play by our rules while they play by their rules. We're all going to play by the same rules. In any case, in like four years, we had the greatest economy in the history of America until COVID hit. And I think what's killing the Democrats right now is that we did let Joe Biden has been doing what he wants. And people, it wasn't very long ago. It wasn't 50 years ago. It wasn't 20 years ago that we had let Joe Biden has been doing what he wants and people it wasn't very long ago it wasn't 50 years ago it wasn't 20 years ago that we had a great economy it was four years ago and people are like we want that back so I think we're experiencing that a little bit now now I've been fascinated Mike by another area that you've been working on and by the way I think that you've just

been so great for America bringing the experiences you know that you know as working on. And by the way, I think that you've just been so great for America, bringing the experiences, you know, that you know as a Hispanic man about communism and helping us unpack it and understand Marxism and how it's playing out in America. But you've also been doing

an amazing job of connecting freedom movements around the globe so that we can learn from each other globally because the left is doing that all the time they have all these like dabos and all these climate summits where they get together but we don't get together as freedom fighters that's happening more and more and and obviously i've talked to you about this before uh rachel that the the are, we were handicapped when we were trying to

do international coalitions because we want to conserve national traditions so what a conservative in Texas wants to conserve is very different from what a conservative in southern Spain or a conservative in Pakistan want to conserve with some overlap. There's a great deal of overlap between Texas and southern Spain, especially since Texas is in many ways a product of southern Spain. But conservatives want to conserve different things. So we were always handicapped in forming international coalitions. However, this time we have met an adversary in these next-gen Marxists

who also exist in Spain and throughout the West and throughout Latin America, which is also a part of the West, that share the same features. They're also at work with the family. In fact, you know, through the World Social Forum, the U.S. Social Forum, the Foro de Sao Paulo, they interchange ideas all the time. They share their practices. And they're the same adversaries that we're facing here. So as we try to devise ways to free ourselves from what they want to impose, there are lessons

that we can learn from Javier Millet in Argentina, from Victor Orban in Hungary, from Vox in Spain, from Giorgio Maloney in Italy. So we are doing that, actually. We're talking to each other increasingly. We're meeting in international fora. We're meeting here. We met about a month ago during CPAC. There was a huge, I think the international contingent was greater than there ever was. We brought the

leader of the Vox party in Spain for lunch here at Heritage. So we are exchanging ideas and best practices, and it's new and it's succeeding for that reason. Our adversaries are very similar now. Can I ask something? Can you explain to our listeners the connection between this, you know, what you call this next-gen Marxism and globalism? The globalists of Davos, in my opinion, are not Marxists. They're corporatists. In other words, they're not at war with the profit motive. They just want to do like Mussolini and Franco and Salazar and the Mexican Free Party did.

They want to be able to tell corporations how to act, how to behave. They want corporations to be nominally free, but they tell them how to act. Whereas the Marxists are at war with the profit motive and do not want private corporations. They want the state to own the corporations. That's the difference between the two. They share many features. They are both globalists as opposed to conservatives, as I said, who want to conserve local traditions. They want to conserve self-rule.

They want to conserve sovereignty. The globalists of both camps, of Davos and of the World Social Forum and of the Forum de Sao Paulo, the left in other words, they're at war with sovereignty. They're at war with localism. They're at war with self-rule. And they're at war with the individual. They believe that this is a technocratic class, and this is a whole new different kind of worms.

I don't know if I should open now because I don't know if we have time to discuss it. With the permanent bureaucracy, the permanent administrative state here in the United States that says we have the technological knowledge. We're the experts. We can rule society. You guys know nothing. These are the teachers telling parents, don't tell us how to teach. You give us your kids and we'll be the parents

for the eight hours that we have in the classroom. And obviously, that doesn't compute with the American people. There are kids. We hire these teachers with our tax dollars to teach our children math and history. Now that history is taught anymore. And English and so forth, but do

not teach them anything moral. Do not teach them anything about morality other than American history and why American history is so great. And words also, because there are words in American history. We'll do the education about moral issues. So that's the things that they share, the left and the Davos right. Globalism, war with the individual. We'll have more of this conversation after this.

You know, Mike, I see Rachel do this all the time on the podcast, but also on Fox and Friends. I do it on my show on the bottom line. We cover the stories of all the crazy things that are happening in America. And the question is always why. And I think you've done a great job in your book, Next Gen Marxism, what it is and how to combat it to unpack the why. Why is this happening? What is it?

Because you can't beat something that you can't identify, that you can't put a label on so you can recognize it when it's coming at you 100 miles an hour. And so I thank you for writing the book, educating those of us who want to fight it and preserve freedom. And thank you for being part of the Kitchen Table. Once again, join us on the podcast. We're always so grateful for your insight and time.

Thanks for being with us. Thank you. I must say that I'm blessed to have you, the Campos Duffies, as friends. I'm blessed with a great family and great parents. And I also was blessed with a great co-author in Catherine Cornell Gorka, who really, both of us worked very, very hard for nine months to produce this book. So I was very lucky. Thank you. Well, I think everybody should have it in their bookshelf.

Everyone should be reading it. This is, as Sean said, you can't fight it unless you know what it is and who they are and where to find them. And they're often on your, you know, they're in your schools,

they're in your government, they're on your school boards and and they are tenacious and they are patient and they've you know hoodwinked us for a long time but i think i love i want to end this because i love the analogy um that you gave i i think you said one of your uh burgess owen said that it's not over yet. This was early detection of this cancer of Marxism. And we still have we still have the ability to fight this. There's still time. And this upcoming election is so important. And the more people that understand what you and your co-author have wrote about in this book,

the more I think people will fight against it at the ballot box. And as Donald Trump said, it has to be too big to rig. So we need to spread the message. So I just thank you for writing the book. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Right here at Heritage, we're enunciating the policies that would help us in this fight at the Heritage Foundation. Thank you very much for the two of you, Sean, Rachel.

You're a lovely couple, lovely family. Thank you very much for the two of you, Sean, Rachel. You're a lovely couple, lovely family. Thank you very much for this podcast. Mike Gonzalez. Thank you, Mike Gonzalez. Heritage Foundation, which by the way, we love the Heritage Foundation now. It's gotten so much better over the last few years. We love it. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. Bye. Great stuff. Listen, I...

Mike is... He just knows his stuff. Mike is always a great guest because he knows it front and back. And, you know, you notice with him, he's so steeped in what's happening. And I love how he is able to synthesize it and break it down so it's a digestible message about what's happening and how you beat it. about what's happening and how you beat it. Well, you know, for me, the eye opener, the transformation I've had over the last few years is sort of like I had this idea that, you know, this had to do with Marxism. But I was so confused because I kept thinking about it as starting in the 60s, right? Because I kept thinking about it as an American thing. And what I've learned through people like Mike,

even my co-host Pete Hegg said through his book on education, is that when you understand the history, when you understand the progressive movement, when you understand Stalin, the Bolshevik Revolution, when you understand Karl Marx, and you go, well, I don't have time for all that. Well, guess what? You've got to make time to understand Karl Marx. And you go, well, I don't have time for that. Well, guess what? You've got to make time to understand these things. And there are different ways to digest this material. Maybe you're the kind of person that likes to sit and read a book.

But now there's amazing podcasts that talk about it. You can grab Mike's book, but you can also get a primer by listening to our podcast. You can listen to other people who break down the history through their podcasts. So I think it's really incumbent on all of us to understand that part of our civic duty isn't just to go and vote. Part of our civic duty is to be deeply informed because the people who are transforming America, they get their ideas from history. They didn't start here in America. It started in Europe. It started in the Soviet Union. We need to go back and start to understand and unpack that.

Even the story of feminism, which has been such a tool of the Marxist experiment, the Marxist enterprise. The book we had Carrie Gress on, who wrote the book, The End of Woman, and she went all the way back to the early feminists to show where that all started, the ones that were doing it for the good reasons, and how the bad feminists, the ones who were mentally ill and had all these issues and they were damaged, ended up being the ones who were the four mothers of the feminism that we have now, and the witchcraft, and the anti-man stuff. So there's understanding where it all comes from just allows you to understand what's happening here.

So it comes down to this for me. It's a question of when you listen to someone, whether it's their ideas, their position, their policies, ask yourself, does this position, this policy, this argument, does it give me more freedom or does it take my freedom away? And the left has become masterful at packaging their freedom thievery. They put it in glitter-wrapped paper with bows, and it looks beautiful. Well, I think the best one that they did was during the pandemic. It's like, we're going to take away your freedom and mandate that you get the vaccine that doesn't work, that's not going to prevent you from getting COVID, and not going to stop you from spreading COVID, but we're going to tell you that you're not doing this for you. You're doing it for your grandparents. You're doing it for your community.

You're saving other people by taking an ineffective vaccine that could make you sick. Yeah. For safety. And they pumped up the fear and people went along. Complete lie. Any smart person could unpack that and go, well, I actually want to make a decision for myself. And by the way, if this is a vaccine, that means that I'm protected and everyone else who's been vaccinated, they too

are protected. Their argument didn't work, but people bought into giving up their freedom. When they want to take away your gun rights, red flag laws, when they want to restrict your ability to own a firearm, all of those who want to take away your freedom

are the ones who are supporting this Marxist movement. And Sean, you know, you bring such a great point in how tempting it is. The other way that they're taking away your freedom is by convenience. So it's just so convenient to be cashless, right?

But by moving us into a cashless society, getting us all on digital currency where we never see a dollar bill, because if you have a dollar bill, they can't track where your dollar went. Now they're going to do digital. They're going to go to digital currency. They're going to try. We're going to go to digital but listen people are slowly i mean i know lots of great conservatives who seem unaware of where this digital thing currency will go to this is exactly how the chinese have permanently

entrapped their people i'm going to the airport and I got to get on my flight. And oh my goodness, this is really easy. Why don't I just let them get a digital scan of my face and I can walk right in. I fell for that. It's easy. I'm like, hell no. Here's my ID. You're not going to digitally scan my face as I go through TSA, but it's easy.

And a lot of great conservatives. Through convenience. Through convenience. A hundred percent. So again, if they want to take away your gasoline vehicle, they're Marxists. Right? If they want to take away your ability to eat meat and make you eat grasshoppers, they're Marxists. Easy stuff. Look at everything through the lens of freedom. Freedom givers or freedom takers. And then you can see the world far more clear. And I just love Mike Gonzalez. And I love you too, by the way.

Thank you, Hank. Great to hit the kitchen table. It is. Tough topics. But I love it. It was a positive message, Sean. We caught it early. We caught the cancer early.

We all, you know, the pandemic for all the bad things that happened. Oh, it early. We caught the cancer early. We all, you know, the pandemic for all the bad things that happened woke up a lot of people who were sleeping. Lights and sirens are going off now, America. Yeah, and we have one last chance. We have one election left. And Sean, you've heard this all the time.

This is the most important election. This is it. The turnout has to be too big to rig. And that's the way it's got to be. And here we are. Here we are. Well, listen, thanks for joining us at the Kitchen Table. If you like our podcast,

rate, review, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. Always find us at foxnewspodcast.com. You can subscribe there, get a notice every time we drop Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The Duffy's Kitchen Table is dropped. You can subscribe there. Get a notice every time we drop Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The Duffy's Kitchen Table is dropped. You'll know that because you've subscribed. So you want to do that. And listen, love Mike. Love you. Until next time. Bye, everybody. Have a good one. Bye bye. Thank you for joining us for the Kitchen Table with

the Duffy's. We've enjoyed the conversation. And if you did too, let us know. Subscribe, rate, and review this podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. We hope to see you around the table next week. Bye-bye. Jason and the House, the Jason Chaffetz podcast. Dive deeper than the headlines and the party lines

as I take on American life, politics, and entertainment. Subscribe now on foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts.