The Eric Metaxas Show - Paul Kengor

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Paul Kengor co-authored a new book about Marxism: "The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Ladies and gentlemen, buckle your seatbelts and keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times. Here comes Mr. Thrill Ride himself, Eric Mattaxas. Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show. Do you like books? I do too.

In fact, I've written some. And my guest right now has also written some books. And I want to talk to him about his brand new book. My guest is Paul Kangor. He's been on this program before. He is a professor at Grove City College, Polysai professor. Paul Kangor, welcome. Eric, it is always good to be with you.

Thank you very much for having me back. Well, it's our pleasure. You have a new book out. with a provocative title, it's called The Devil and Bella Dodd, one woman's struggle against communism and her redemption. Brand new book, The Devil and Bella Dodd by Paul Kangor. What is this book about, sir? Yeah, I'll tell you, she ought to be somebody that everybody knows about.

And at one point, Eric, she was. In fact, at one point in the 1950s, she would have been one of the top one or two. I mean, either than maybe Elizabeth Bentley. probably the most famous female ex-communist in America. She went on to boldly testified before Congress, before the Senate, multiple times about how she infiltrated education and all kinds of other different things for the Communist Party. But in the 1930s and 1940s, she was a leading, a leading female communist. And she described her battle to extricate herself from the communist movement as quite literally

a battle with the devil himself. Well, that's obviously why the book is titled The Devil and Belladad. I am perfectly unfamiliar with this except for your book, which is just out. And it's one of the reasons I'm excited to hear more about this. So what prompted you, speaking as an author, it's a big deal to write a book. What prompted you to write a book on this Bella Dodd? What was it for you? Well, it started with my co-author, Mary Nicholas, who's a medical doctor in Maine.

And she's been on this for years. She's been on it for decades. And she asked me to come in as the co-author. And at first, Eric, I said, no, I mean, she had done so much work. And I thought it couldn't be justified. But she really urged me to come in. She felt she needed my help. And as someone who had never written a book before in her case, not a professional historian,

And I mean, she can diagnose patients in ways that I can't, right? But I knew something about history and writing books in a way that she doesn't. So I came into it that way. But that said, as somebody who spent my life studying communism and studying figures, you know, Whitaker Chambers and others, she's really like a female Whitaker Chambers. I knew about her, and I think this is really key. And this, Eric, is really going to hit your audience. What I knew about Bella Dodd, not just was she famous or infamous.

for completely infiltrating the teachers union, especially in the state of New York, where out of 10, she testified to Congress on this. Out of 10,000 members of the New York State Teachers Union in the 1930s, she had placed a thousand communists. They had 500 New York communist teachers marching in a May Day parade in New York. But let's look, let's be clear, Paul, because not everyone's an historian. In the 1930s, many, many people thought, communism was the way of the future. It was a good thing. It made tremendous inroads.

People were, we have apologists for Stalin, you know, getting Pulitzer Prizes in the New York Times. It was a time before much of the world knew the satanic evil of the Soviet Union. And so you had a lot of these folks that were, they really believed somehow that communist, was a good thing. Obviously, Beladadad was one. So what was it that they saw or that they believed communism could bring about? And when did they, when did she begin to see that this wasn't the case, that this crusade that she was on had not been a good thing? Well, kind of the final thing, I'll hit that first, that pulled her in was, was fascism. And there's a quote from her in the book. She said, I joined the devil himself that that's what it took to fight fascism. Now, of course,

you'd have to be a communist to fight fascism, right? But the party was really good at creating groups with front groups with names like the American League against war and fascism. But in her case, she came to America. She was born in Picherno, Italy in 1904. So Eric, she had this beautiful Italian Catholic name, right? Mary Asanta Isabella Vistono, which means like the assumption of the Blessed Mother, right? And she comes to America. And she came to New York.

Her family brought her here for a better life. And she immediately fell in with radical elements in her grade school, in her high school at Hunter College in New York. Hunter College was a hotbed of communism edition. Like that's a fact. But listen, it's just, I want to be clear. It's just fascinating to me that many people joined the Nazis because they hated Bolshevism. Yeah. many people joined the communists because they hated fascism.

It's fascinating to me how you have two really dramatically similarly wicked ideologies, seeing the other as the ultimate enemy. And so you're given this bizarre false choice between Hitler-style fascism, Muslim-style fascism, and Lenin-Stalin-style Bolshevism. and you're forced to choose. And we know both of these are just absolutely evil. But that's a lot of what got folks involved on one side of the other while these movements were just kind of finding their legs.

Yeah, the Nazis were the National German, the Socialist German Workers Party. You know, Ronald Reagan used to like to say there's not a dime's worth of difference between them, the fascists and the communists. And of course, they did come together in August 1930. when Hitler and Stalin signed their pact. And that was a major wake-up call, especially to Jewish members of the American Communist Party. A lot of them bolted the party at that point.

For Bella Dodd, that shocked her as well, although she was so embroiled in the party at that point that she stayed in there. And then when the party, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 22nd, 1941, Operation Barbarossa, right? you know, that kind of changed everything for a lot of these people. But she was drawn in by that. You mentioned Hunter College as a hotbed, Eric, right? You're in New York. Columbia University. Columbia really pulled her in. It pulled in Whitaker Chambers, who went to Columbia as this like Taft Republican. It pulled in people like Thomas Merton. And it pulled in Bella Dodd as well. So I knew about that.

I knew about the infiltration of education. But here's really the. the key one that I think people in this audience will appreciate. I knew about the claim of Bella Dodd that she had helped place, quote, over a thousand communist men, unquote, in Catholic seminaries. Now, the party had been infiltrating the mainline Protestant denominations. What became Presbyterian Church USA, the Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church was really hit hard. In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is still to this day, there's tentacles of that. but but they had not had much success with the Catholic Church.

They went to her to see if she could help them infiltrate the Catholic Church, and she said yes, she saluted the red flag. It's amazing. And of course, she was able to get a Pope, today's Pope, Pope Francis, hardcore Marxist. Actually, some people say that. Of course, I'm half joking, but my friend John Smirik seems to think that it is clear that the that the Marxist infiltrated, you know, the Catholic Church and many, many,

many other institutions. What was it that made Belidod see that something was wrong? What was the trigger for her? Well, she started to see just how insidious the party was, the thought control, the smearing of people, destroying people's character, finding out what Stalin was really about, what the Soviet Union was really about. I mean, there's a myriad of so many different things. I mean, among them, Eric, she wanted to have a family. She wanted to have children. And the communists told her not to have children.

In fact, communists were advising people in the party to have abortions. Whitaker Chambers, when his wife got pregnant, he was going to do the communist thing, have an abortion. Alger Hiss's wife, Priscilla, who's the one that Alger would bring the documents home to and she would type them on the typewriter and they'd send them off to Moscow. she had an abortion. In fact, I think she after. Well, hang on.

We're going to go to a break here, folks. We're talking to Paul King or K-E-N-G-O-R. The book is The Devil and Bellad. We'll be right to that. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed.

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Just go to patriotmobile.com slash Eric or call their 100% US-based customer service team at 972 Patriot. If you're fed up with woke companies that don't care about your values, support a company that does make the switch today and get a free month of service plus free activation. Patriotmobile.com slash Eric. That's Patriotmobile.com slash Eric or call 972 Patriot. Folks, I'm talking to Paul Kangor. He's a polys eye professor at Grove City College. The new book is The Devil and Bella Dodd. One woman's struggle against communism and her redemption. You were just talking about abortion. Why was the Communist Party,

so dedicated to abortion. I mean, this is a strange link that I think it's important to understand. Yeah, they're really hell bent on it. In fact, if you read the Communist manifesto, which most young people who claim that they like communism have not actually read, right, you'll see lines in there, like, quote, abolition of the family, exclamation mark, even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of a communist, unquote. That's verbatim. from the Communist Manifesto. So your people say, well, you know, communism is a pretty good idea. If you just read the Communist Manifesto, it talks about sharing the wealth and redistributing

wealth. That's not the only thing it talks about, dude. They want to abolish states, property. I mean, the money line, you know, pardon the pun, and the Communist Manifesto is the entire communist theory may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property. So they went after private property. They went after religion. They went after the family.

And one of the first things that the Bolsheviks did in 1920 was legalized abortion. Lenin had written a piece for Pravda in 1913 calling for the unconditional annulment of all laws prohibiting abortion. It's one of the first things that he and Trotsky did. Abortion got so out of control in the Soviet Union, Eric, that Stalin banned it in 1936. He said, we said, we're not going to have a country left. I mean, at one point, there were three abortions for every live birth. I mean, that could go off just in the subject. Margaret Sanger made pilgrimage to the Soviet Union in 1934 to learn about birth control.

She wrote about this the next summer in her birth control review. And she was just marveled at how wonderful birth control has become part of the regular welfare service of the government. But she was horrified at the number of abortions. She was shocked at how many abortions. Even Margaret Sanger, this says a little bit. Even Margaret Sanger, yeah. And an amazing statement of kind of progressive belief in the state. She wrote this in Birth Control Review.

We quote all of this in the book. She said, but it's okay. All of the communist officials with whom I spoke said that once a fully functioning communistic society is moving in Russia, neither abortion or birth control will be necessary. If you just give the state more power. But Stalin realized that was a bunch of gobly. gook, I got to stop this or we're not going to have a future in the country. So he banned it. Khrushchev brings it back in 195, 56. By the 1970s in the Soviet Union, they were averaging

7 to 8 million abortions per year, 7 to 8 million per year. And it was this kind of thing that horrified Bella Dodd. And when the party told her not to have children, that bothered her. I mean, she's a woman, right? She's not just a male member of the Communist Party. She's a young woman who's longing to have children and they're telling her no. So that, politics and so much more disillusioned her. And then when she tried to break away, that's when they really went after her. And Eric, you'll appreciate this. She gets a call. Once she's broken away from the party, she gets a call from an AP reporter who says, I've got a statement here from the Communist Party. It says that you are anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, anti-Po-Po-Po-Po-Pashthist, pro-Nazi.

It's just right out of the playbook, right? You know, racist, anti-Semi, Nazi, all this stuff. And she said, I have no comment. Do they call her transphobic as well? It's kind of amazing, like these names, the way we smear people, it is so evil. The book is The Devil and Bella Dodd. But you wrote a book called The Devil and Karl Marx, where you told, talk, and I think it's very important to understand that there are satanic foundations to

atheist communism. Obviously, we're dealing with it today in China. What they believe is true or what they work against are the most basic things, life, the sanctity of the individual, the family. I mean, it seems, if you were, weren't sure what to think of it. You look at it and say, this looks like a war on God and on God's principles and God's reality. I mean, when you go to war with the family and you start saying that the state owns your children, the state will determine what your children get in school. You, as a parent, have no stay. That strikes at the heart of everything for most people. And we just saw that, you know, before Youngkin became governor in Virginia, you have the man whose name, I'm happy not to

remember running for governor in Virginia saying something shockingly similar. It is as an American and as unbiblical as anything. The idea that parents should not have a say in their children's lives and that kind of thing. But that's at the heart of communist theory. It's at the very basis of it. And you're saying that's part of what triggered Bella Dodd, died in the world communist, finally to wake up. Yeah. In fact, she read the manifesto where it sneers at. It makes fun of what they call the hallowed correlation between parent and child, right? And Bella Dodd actually believed, well, yeah, the correlation, the relationship between parent and child is hallowed, right? This is something special. But they declared war on that. They declared war on religion. And she learned

this very early on when she went to Hunter College, one of her professors, who, by the way, she's a communist, the professor, ended up committing suicide, which a lot of these people did. You know, they had very unhappy lives. And Bella tried to write this innocent little paper, right, about monastic life, which she thought was kind of interesting. And the teacher pulled her in and said, this is a good paper, so I'm going to give you a good grade, but we need to have a talk about this religion stuff. And instead, the teacher wanted to, uh, wanted her to write positively about the French Revolution rather, rather than, rather than about life and monasteries. But, but Lenin called it, called it medieval mildew spiritual booze.

He said there's nothing more abominable than religion. Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. Marx said communism begins where atheism begins. It was a war on God, which is why they went after and tried to infiltrate the churches. And they tapped her to do that as well. Well, and of course they, meaning the communists, were tremendously successful in infiltrate. institutions like the Catholic Church, like teachers' unions. They really worked hard at infiltration.

And as we now know, to some extent, succeeded and that we've still got folks in all of these institutions that are, they lean Marxist. There's no doubt about it. Well, and there's a great quote in the book from Manning Johnson, who was a wonderful ex-communist, African-American. And by the way, we're really pulled him away from the party. was he never left his Baptist church in New York. He said, I just couldn't leave that church. And the party wanted him out of that church completely. But he said, it is an axiom in Communist Party organizing

that if you have a committed core of about 60 to 70 people, you can take over an organization of 10,000. You just need a highly disciplined core of 60 to 70. He said, we didn't need more than 1% of a group. and you know waking up day and night focusing on nothing but that and by the way within religious left organizations which are trusting generally right and can't imagine that people could be this vicious and sneaky um that hardcore element was able to hijack entire organizations well it is extraordinary to me because in my research on the nazis for my bonhofer book to watch how they're not always overt about the god thing. In other words, they don't really want to make trouble. They'll try to suck you in. But as you, if you join the SS, for example, eventually through the 30s, it became more and more impossible,

frankly, to be any kind of a Christian. They made it very, very clear if you wanted to advance in the SS, and again, this is the Nazis, not the communist, but it's a dramatically similar situation where when you have state power, inevitably, it is God and those who love God that are the enemy. And so it's fascinating how they don't lead with that necessarily because they don't want to scare people away. But eventually you discover what's at the heart of where they're coming from. Well, and I quote in the book, Herb Philbrick, who also testified before Congress and it infiltrated the party. And he said, he was told that literally, put your hand on a stack of Bibles and say, I don't believe in God, or say, I believe in God,

if that's what it takes, you know, which for them, it wasn't hard to lie in a stack of, lie in a stack of Bibles. They didn't, they didn't flat out believe in God. But that's what they were told. And also William Z. Foster testified before Congress, I think 1932 it was. And they were told, they asked him, they said, Mr. Foster, can somebody be a Christian or a believer and belong to the Communist Party. And he's kind of visibly scratching his head, Eric, he's saying, well, I don't know why you'd want to be a communist and be a member of the party and believe in God. But if you, if you joined and you still had some religious scruples, yeah, you would need to, you would need to be in the process of liquidating those in order to be a good member of the party.

It's kind of funny because, again, in the 50s in that period in particular, people weren't really afraid. Serious Christians, whether they're Billy Graham or whoever, we're not afraid to point to the atheist and ultimately satanic roots, the anti-God roots of communism. We'll be right back. Folks talking to Paul Kangor. The book is The Devil and Bellad. Tell me, Eric, why is Relief Factor so successful at lowering or eliminating pain? I'm often asked that question. The owners of Relief Factor tell me they believe our bodies were designed to heal. That's right. Designed to heal, and I agree with them. So the doctors who formulated relief factor for them selected the four best ingredients, yes, 100% drug-free ingredients, each helps your body deal with inflammation. Each of

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Hey, folks, I'm talking to Paul Kangor about his brand new book, The Devil and Bella Dodd, one woman's struggle against communism and her redemption. We were talking about in the 1950s, just. off the air now, you mentioned Fulton Sheen, the great Fulton Sheen, who, in many ways, was a Catholic counterpart to Billy Graham, who was unapologetic in making clear that the Christian faith was the enemy of communism and communism was the enemy of the Christian faith. He was a wonderful voice in the 1950s on his TV program. Yeah, he was enormously influential. I mean, he's the most famous American Catholic of all time. And he had a TV show called Life is Worth Living,

which won the Emmy, knocked Frank Sinatra off the air. His famous acceptance speech of the Emmys was, I'd like to begin by thanking my writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, right? So just this really witty priest that everybody loved, everybody knew about. And Bella Dodd, after she leaves the party, and she's wiped out. She's an attorney. She's, she's, She goes to Congress and she visits with her congressman McGrath from New York. And he says, Bella, isn't there something I can do for you? I could see the trouble she's having. She said, the FBI is following me.

The KGB is following me. She says, how about a priest? Would you like to see a priest? And she said, out of her gut, she just said, yes. And she hadn't been in church since she was a little girl at that point. And he said to his secretary, Rose, he said, can you call, can you call Monsignor Sheen? over at Catholic University. They called him, Eric, and he said, tell Dr. Dodd to come over to my apartment tonight, Chevy Chase.

So he opens the door. She walks in, and she describes this in her memoir, School of Darkness. He comes in, she said, just like on TV, wearing the big pectoral cross. And he sat me down. And she said, he didn't talk to me like the Bolsheviks would have. If he would have, he would have said, you old Bolshevik, call me, hag. You bag. what's wrong with you? You know, you this, you that. She said, he was pure mercy, pure forgiveness.

And he just put his hand on my shoulder and I wept and wept. And she said, pretty soon she was on her knees. And he said to her, he said, I'm going to be going back to New York in the spring. Why don't you come to New York and take instruction with me and consider coming back into the church. And she did. And he heard her confession, I think April 7, 1952, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. came back into the church. And then three weeks after that, he was in Rome. And this is on the front page of the New York Times, April 28, 1952. Sheen speaking at St. Susanna, American Catholic Church in Rome, and the title was something like, Sheen in Rome talks about red infiltration of priesthood. So, she had told him, and she also told later, we quote them in the book, Alice von Hildebrandt. Did you know Alice?

Alice von Hildobrand. I am honored to say that she was a dear friend. And I know that she was at Hunter College and she was in the middle of these battles. I'm not at all surprised that she would figure in this story. I interviewed her to Socrates in the city once, one of my favorite interviews of all time. So yeah, tell us about that. Yeah. So she and her husband, Dietrich von Hildebrand. Now, Alice just died January 2022. She was 90 years. old. So we interviewed her for this book. And she talked to Bella a number of times. She and Dietrich both. I mean, Dieter died a long time ago, right? He died in 1980. Okay, over 40 years ago, yeah. And was born in 1889. I would joke around with her. I said, I can't believe that I'm friends with a woman whose husband was born in 1889. And she said, oh, that's nothing. My father-in-law was born in 1847. That's great. Yeah, that's a great story. She married him. she was very young when they got married. But they both met with Bella Dodd, and Alice has told the story many times.

She wrote about it in her memoir. She wrote it about a bunch of articles. She's on video saying, and she told us about it. They were talking to Bella Dodd. And Dietrich said, you know, Alice, I can't help but feel that, you know, Bella, I can't help but feel that perhaps the church has been infiltrated. And Bella Dodd said, you think it. I know it.

And he said, what? And he said, she said, I know it. And he said, tell me about it. And she went on to talk about how when she was in the party, she helped organize over a thousand communist men to infiltrate the priesthood. So Alice never forgot that and talked about it a number of times. Well, Alice Van Hill LeBron was such a heroic figure. I just want to encourage people go to Socrates in the City.com.

You can watch my interview with her. Just an amazing, amazing woman and a hero. And of course, she was here in New York in the midst of those battles at Hunter College. Really just extraordinary. So now, if Bella Dodd- Did I say this one thing? Yeah, let me say this one thing that Bella Dodd said to Fulton Sheen. She said, she said, Father Sheen, Bishop Sheen,

I want to go into the most penitential order on the planet and spend the rest of my life on my knees. in reparation and penance for what I've done. And he said, and he said, no, don't do that. Here's what I want you to do. And it was the same thing that Pope Pius XVI the 11th, who wrote Divini Redemptress, calling communism a satanic scourge in 1937. Same thing he told Sheen.

Sheen said, Beledod, I want you to go tell the world about the evils of communism, you know, from the west coast to the east coast to wherever. And that's what she did. And she was absolutely smeared, tart and feathered for it. But that's how she did her penance and made reparation for what she did in her past. Folks, we're going to go to a break. I'm talking to Paul Kangor, the brand new book, The Devil and Bella Dodd, one woman's struggle against communism and her redemption.

Amazing stuff. Don't forget, go to my website, Erica Metaxus.com. Lots of stuff there. Sign up for my newsletter. We send it out about once a week. All of these interviews, you can see what Paul and I are wearing. how we've styled our hair. Go to Eric Mataxas.com.

Sign up for those newsletters. We'll be right back. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lots of companies are coming out saying they'll pay for employee abortion, travel, and expenses. Most of you've heard about some of these companies. You've decided to stop shopping or doing business there, but did you know that you most likely own stock in those companies

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They're known to sell quickly. So order now with promo code Eric at mypillow.com. Mypillow.com. Promocode Eric. Folks, I'm talking to Paul Kangor. He's at Grove City College. PolySai professor has written many books. The new one is called The Devil and Bella Dodd with his co-author, Mary Nicholas.

Why, Paul, you were just mentioning that Mary Nicholas really led the charge on wanting to tell this story. You said she's a medical doctor. What was it that interested her originally in the story of Bella Dodd? Yeah, she had an aunt who dealt with this. She, and worked for the federal government, I think maybe the CIA. And she had heard about this stuff, this infiltration when she was a little girl. And also, too, seeing some of the, let's just say, pro-Marxist elements within her Catholic church that Mary grew up. and including ideas like Marxist-based liberation theology, right? You know, some of the things that happened in other orders,

some of the things that happened with the Jesuits. A lot of people in the Catholic Church have wondered, where are the tentacles of this thing? How did this church, which in 1846, two years before the Communist Manifesto was even published, Popeius the 9th issued Quip Ploorubus, warning about the satanic scourge of communism? So how could we be here today?

where you have someone like Pope Francis who, for the record, Pope Francis has said, the Marxist ideology is wrong. Now, the rest of that quote is, but I have many Marxists who are good friends. And you see the America magazine, the Jesuit magazine in July 2019, ran a piece called the Catholic case for communism that it has a picture of Evo Morales, the Bolivian president handing to Pope Francis, a grinning Pope Francis, communist crucifix. I have seen this. I've seen this photo. It is, listen, I'm not a Catholic, but I'm a pro-Catholic, non-Catholic. And when I see where this Pope leans many times, I'm just astonished. Yeah. And it plays out on issues like his position on China,

his silence on what's happened in Nicaragua. Once again, persecution of the church there. So, whereas I won't, I'm not going to say he's a Marxist, but he's very far to the left, and he's certainly indeed friendly with, with, with, with those folks. Yeah, and here's the problem. He's the Pope. Right. That's right. So Bella Dodd was born in 1904, died, I believe, 1969. Correct. So did not live very long. What was her life like and why did she die so young? She was never in good shape. And really her health problems date back to when she was a little girl and she got her foot caught in a trolley track in New York, and the foot was cut off and had to be amputated.

She spent about a year in a hospital recuperating in New York where she just red and red and red and red. So she became this very kind of precocious. And that's why she became so red? That was a joke. That was a joke. But, I mean, my goodness, the tragedies that some people went through. Okay. So as a little girl that sent her into a hospital.

so she was reading. But you're saying her health problems continued. Throughout the rest of her life, and she checked into a hospital, St. Vincent College in New York, 1969 to go in for, I think it was a fairly simple procedure, but she was already in bad shape. She's in her early 60s at that point. And she was not expected to lose her life. But she did. And by the way, this is so touching. She goes into a coma and they call for a priest. And they don't know who they're going to call. And just as she's coming out of the coma, Fulton Sheen drops by for a visit. And she opens her eyes for the first and last time from the coma. And Sheen is there.

And, you know, he blesses her. He anoints her. Gives her the last rights. And she goes off into the next world for her heavenly reward. So it's beautiful. You just, you can't make that up. No, you can't make that up. Somebody should write a book about it.

Actually, it is interesting to me, I mentioned it earlier, but how publicly, or I should say how public Christians like the great Fulton Sheen, Billy Graham, how they were, they were themselves publicly opposed to communism and spoke about it. And of course, I keep thinking about this because my new book is called Letter to the American Church, where we, we, Many Christians today have been fooled into thinking somehow that if you're a Christian, you're not supposed to be political or you're not supposed to take a political stance. And that's, first of all, preposterous, secondly, unbiblical. And thirdly, when you're talking about communism, when you're talking about things like, whether it's the Soviets or the Chinese today, their values are. sort of nakedly hostile to the values of Christians.

And so it's fascinating to see someone like Billy Graham or Fulton Sheen so openly making the connection that this doctrine is godless and we have to be aware of it. And that really today is so much less the case. And so we have to make the case that atheistic big state ideologies are ineption. inevitably deeply hostile to God to the point of being satanically so. Well, and you have to be aware of the wolves and sheep's clothing. As Ronald Reagan said in the evil empire speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, there is sin and evil in the world, and we are joined by scripture and the Lord Jesus

to oppose it with all of our might, and especially when they're infiltrating your churches. We quote in the beginning of this book, Earl Browder, the infamous head of Communist Party USA, speaking Eric to Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1935, and he says to these seminarians, he said, you may be surprised to know that we have preachers, preachers who are active in churches, who are members of our Communist Party. Now, that's shocking. He's not saying we have preachers who are sympathetic to our ideas. We have preachers who are actual members of a Communist Party. You're supposed to be an atheist if you're going to be a member of a Communist Party. So what are those guys doing? Well, they're infiltrating. They're hijacking. And by the way, when they, they don't just influence atheists and other non-believers. They'll influence people within the church who are kind of soft on these issues. And under the rubric of social justice, redistributing wealth, or doing other things, or fighting fascism, they'll be able to rope in kind of a wider group. And that's a danger. We have to be aware of that and oppose it.

We're going to have to leave it there. But Bella Dodd described her battle with atheistic communism. She called it a satanic scourge, a school of darkness, a school of hate. And by God's grace, she was pulled out of that and able to expose it. Paul Kangor, congratulations on the book, The Devil, and Bella Dodd. Thanks for being with us. Hey, any time. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Happy Thanksgiving again and again and again. Okay, Alvin. The week, the weekend. Yay. We have some particularly exciting news. We do. We're going to save that in a minute or two.

Before we get to the exciting news, and I am, I'm almost shocked at this news. This is big news, folks. I think you're going to have some fun. Okay. I want to mention a couple things. Neutermetics told us that for the rest of this month only, that's November, 2022, if you use the code Eric, it's 35% off. I don't know why they chose to do that.

that at the end of the month, but I would take advantage of it if you're interested. Nutrametics.com, 35% off. Also want to repeat, if you're interested in company Socrates in the city, I can only tell you, folks, it is Oz Guinness. He's the gold standard. You'll see when you're there, there's no one like him. If it weren't for Oz, I never would have started Socrates in the city. So this is a very special event, December 6th, here in New York City. We're looking forward to that. I'm traveling like crazy. I'm preaching in Atlanta at Church of the Apostles in Atlanta this Sunday morning. You can find out everything at my website, which is ericmetaxis.com. And I want to remind you, before we tell you the big news, I want to remind you to sign up for my

newsletter at Ericmetaxis.com. And I want to remind you to remind you, you, you, you know, you to support our sponsor, Mike Lindell, by buying all of your Christmas gifts at mystore.com and mypillow.com and use the code Eric to help support this radio program. There is all kinds of stuff there. You just have to go there and you'll see. But if you want to support a hero, someone that I now think of as a dear friend, kind, generous soul when you get to know him, my pillow.com, my store.com. And as we always say, the coffee is unbelievable. Oh, yeah. I can't believe how good it. Honestly, I just, it's going to be mediocre. It's going to be fine. No, it's really good. It is. It's my store.com, my coffee.com. Okay, Alvin, the big news. Yes, the big news. Oh, I love this.

This is hard to get my head around. Okay, where do we start? About a few months ago, we taped four episodes of a late night talk show, the talk show starring Eric Metaxis. That's me. It was, you know, next level. It was like the Tonight Show, Carson, Letterman, you know, it was like a big deal thing. We raised the money to tape four bona fide episodes, hour-long episodes, which we did downstairs. We're upstairs here at the TBN Theater, downstairs in the theater, which is a heavenly little theater. I mean, just like made for this kind of a thing. We taped the four shows.

We had an array of stunning guests. Yeah. the shows were edited and basically we're trying to figure out who is going to air it and how we're going to do that. But in the meantime, somebody thought, hey, now that these shows are edited, why don't we put them up at SalemNow.com? Yes. For free. Free. You understand?

Free. SalemNow.com. So I am really just a little thrilled and shocked. to say that you can watch these episodes. These are pilot episodes. We taped them in August, but we thought let's make them available if you go to SalemNow.com, and how do it there? Well, there's a search bar up there. Put in Eric Metaxes. Put in Eric Metaxus. Two things will come up. The radio program, which is also at Salem Radio, Radio, Cellium Communications. Salem News Network. That's right. That'll come up. Okay, yeah, but we're not talking about that.

We're talking about the talk show, the late-night talk show. There's a great little logo up there. You're going to see it. You click on that. You get all four programs. I think it's free. I'm not positive. I hope it's not free.

No, I'm serious. Like, this costs us a zillion dollars to produce. But the guests are like Danny Bonaducci of the Partridge family. George Hamilton, Carol Alt, Vince and Pastori from the Sopranos. Ron Howard. Ron Howard, John Cleese. Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. Carrot. I mean, look, you'll see. A lot of great thing. We had a great time. I just can't believe. Well, there's the announcement. Thank you.