Pints With Aquinas - DESTROYING Communism w/ Dr. Paul Kengor

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Dr. Kengor's Paper: http://spectator.org Dr. Kengor's New Book! https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Bella-Dodd-Communism-Redemption/dp/1505129184 Why Don't They teach this in School?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism: https://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Guide-Communism-Guides/dp/162157587X The Devil and Karl Marx: https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Karl-Marx-Communisms-Infiltration/dp/1505114446 Communism: A History: https://www.amazon.com/Communism-History-Modern-Library-Chronicles/dp/0812968646 Sponsors-- Pray on Hallow (FREE TRIAL): https://hallow.com/matt Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt-home/ Parler: https://parler.com/mattfradd

All right, we are live. We are live with Dr. Paul Kangor. Pleasure. Yeah, great to be with you, Matt. Thanks. Yeah. Terrific. For those of...

Great studio. Thank you. You like it? Yeah, I do. We have 800 children all around us. Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's right.

Or at least, yeah, about 800. That's about right. For those who aren't familiar with you, who are you? What do you do? Well, oh man, so I don't know how much of the life story do you want, but I was born December 1966 in Pittsburgh. So I was born at McGee Hospital in Pittsburgh, which is on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh,

which is ironic because I ended up going to school there as an undergrad. And I went to Butler High School, Butler High School, Butler High School, Butler Pennsylvania, and that was so that's the alma mater of people as diverse as Rick Santorum, Terry Hanratty, the Notre Dame quarterback, Steelers quarterback, who was there for the Immaculate Reception of Franco Harris. Not even pretend to understand that reference. You know you don't know the Immaculate Reception. The American football, is it? Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

By the way, as a giant American football fan, I gotta admit, to call it football is really stupid. I mean, what does that have to do with football? I mean, you kick during an American football, but football, I guess you could call it like tackle. I wonder what the history of that is. I don't know. How it came to be called that.

It's really ridiculous. And I bleed black and gold as a Steelers fan, but you don't know what the Immaculate Reception is, no? I barely know what the Steelers are. So, all right. So we have two hours, right? All right. Forget the communism talk. Let's just do this. But the 50th anniversary, December 23rd, 1972, of this epic game between the Steelers and the Oakland Raiders. They had like almost 30 Hall of Famers between the two teams.

I mean, that's just an amazing thing. And there's like 30 seconds left on the clock, maybe less than that. Fourth and 10, I think Terry Bradshaw, the Steelers quarterback, just throws a desperate pass down the field aiming for a guy named Frenchy Fuqua. And it hits Fuqua in the back and bounces in the air. And Franco Harris reaches down and picks it up

before it falls on the ground, runs it in for a touchdown, Steelers win, and they gave it the name, the Immaculate Reception. We're gonna have to watch this on YouTube after the interview. By the way, as I'm saying this and people are listening, Frank O'Harris just died, he was 72 years old. When was it? Yesterday.

You know, it's funny you say that because this morning I turned the radio on accidentally and I heard Immaculate Reception. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's an absolutely stunning thing because he was, as far as we know, he was in great shape. And so the Steelers are playing the Raiders on Christmas Eve, December 24th, and the NFL network set up all of this. The entire country was gonna watch the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Immaculate Reception. It's known as the most famous play

in the history of NFL football. And Franco Harris was gonna be there, and they were gonna retire his jersey. They've only retired one or two jerseys, the Steelers, despite all these great players, and he died. He died yesterday, a complete shock. I wrote a piece on it for Crisis Magazine and I think they're gonna be posting it on the 23rd. But anyway, so that's part of Steelers football lore. And where do you

teach now? And what do you teach? So I teach at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, which is alma mater of Scott Hawn. And Scott was, when Scott was at Grove City, he was chasing around Catholics with torches, running them off campus. And Scott ended up, of course, being the most, probably the most famous convert. I would say in the English speaking world, he's probably converted almost as many people as John Paul II. Yeah, no, really true. And in fact, his

book Rome's Sweet Home, which if you go back and read through it, you'll see, oh yeah, wow, Grove City College. It's all through there. So he talks all about Grove City. That's where he met Kimberly as well, his wife. When did you first meet Scott? So I met him in the early 2000s. I got to Grove City College in 1997. It was really my first full-time teaching job out of college. And Scott, yeah, it's kind of interesting. So my colleague, Michael Coulter, who's also a convert and teaches at Grove City College, pulled me aside one day and said,

hey, I got this call from Scott Hahn, who was stuck in an airport and he found your book, God and Ronald Reagan. And he read in the back, read my bio that I taught at Grove City College, and Scott and kind of typical Hans speak said, you can see a lot about Ken Gore in the bio, in the words of this book, right? What does that mean? But I think he was referring to a lot of the Catholic

references, the relationship between Reagan and John Paul II, Reagan and Mother Teresa. Reagan's family had all these Catholic influences. His father was Catholic, his only sibling, his brother was a daily communicant. So are you a convert? I'm a convert, yeah. Well, I mean technically I'm a revert, but I was raised in the church in the dark ages. When was that? The 1970s. The 70s. Robbie George asked me one time, he said, Paul, tell me your story. You're a convert? No, you're a revert. And I said, yeah, I said, well, you know, I was raised in the church in the 70s. And he said, oh, the dark ages, you

know, you don't need to say anything else. You don't need to say anything else. But yeah, so I was, say anything else. You don't need to say anything else. But yeah, so I was, I fell away from the church in the 80s when I went to college, University of Pittsburgh. I was a pre-med major at the University of Pittsburgh. So I went there, I worked for the organ transplant team from 1987 to 91. It was pioneered, organ transplantation was pioneered by my boss, Dr. Thomas Starzl. There's a great documentary on him, which just came out about three years ago called, why can't I think of the name of it right now? Neil could probably find it.

The documentary on Dr. Thomas Starzl, and it is a burden of genius, that's what it's called. So we did 90% of the world's organ transplants at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 90s. And I was agnostic, almost atheist at that point, and I was planning on going to medical school. It was the late 80s and I got very very interested in the end of the Cold War. I started writing for the student newspaper which was called the Pitt News. That's where I met my wife, she was the copy editor. I was the editorial page editor. Published four days a week, Monday through Thursday, print edition. I was the campus

conservative that all the liberals attacked and called names. You know, already calling me every name in the book before I even wrote like my second column. I mean at that point I already been called a fascist, a Nazi, and you know just go you know go on down the line for writing an article on Reagan arming the Contras in Nicaragua or something. But I was, so I got interested in the end of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Solidarity Movement,

Mikhail Gorbachev, and I got pulled in my senior year between majoring in biochem biophysics, which was my major, and taking a bunch of courses on political science. And I thought, boy, what do I really wanna do with my life? Which direction do I wanna go in? What do I wanna do? And interestingly, I used to walk home to my apartment on North Craig Street in Oakland,

right next to Chief's Bar. You know where Chief's is? Okay. I thought you would. You haven't been here long enough yet. That's right. But right next to Chief's Bar and I would stop at St. Paul's Cathedral in Oakland and go inside and just sort of beg God. I'd say, you know, if you're really there, if you really exist, tell me what am I supposed to do with my life? What do you want me to do with my life? Tell me, please tell me. So you went into a pub to ask this question?

Well, no, I went into St. Paul's Cathedral. Oh, okay. I missed that. You went into a pub and then you went to the church? No, no. So the pub was right next to my apartment. But I would go, I would stop at St. Paul's Cathedral on the way home from class or from work when I worked at the organ transplant team, because I worked there almost full time while I was in school.

And I would just beg God, what am I supposed to do with my life? What if you exist? What am I supposed to do? So it was a really agonizing decision, but I ended up graduating with a degree in political science intending to finish my degree in biochem biophysics. Transplant team hired me full time out of school.

I did that for about a year. And then I went to college graduate school at American University in Washington, the school of international service, focusing in foreign policy, national security, and really focusing on the issue of the end of the Cold War, communism, Russia, China, Eastern Europe. And it was there for a few years, worked for a number of think tanks and other organizations. My wife and I, we got married when we were in DC. And then I came back to, we both came back to the University of Pittsburgh to apply for graduate school

because DC, it's a great place to work, but if you're in that field, but it's not a place to raise kids. It's kind of a rat race. So we both decided we're going to apply back to our alma mater. She applied to the master's program in exercise physiology. I applied to the master or the PhD program and we both got in. So we both came back and got our graduate degrees there and then I got hired at Grove City College in 1997. So my conversion, I mean, my wife took a gamble. She married me when I was really not a Christian and And she didn't understand that, how I couldn't believe in God. I remember tearful conversations with her, right, where she just said,

I just don't see how you can't believe. And I would give agnostic, atheistic arguments. But I eventually, through, frankly, evangelical Christians, found my way to the faith. Kind of... Who was one of the more prominent ones that you- Well, it's a good question. I mean, I read a whole bunch of them, and I mean, all the popular ones of the day.

I listened to kind of Evangelical Talk Radio, R.C. Sproul, who was an influence on Scott Hahn, D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, of course, C.S. Lewis, right? And I read all of them and I kind of reasoned my way into the Christian faith. And then slowly, so I joined the Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian Church USA, PCUSA, that's considered the mainline denomination of Presbyterians. By the way, they call the Presbyterians the split peas because they're always splitting. And PCUSA recently split again.

In fact, there in Grove City, my church, Tower Church, was PCUSA. Scott Honnell knew all of this. And then across the street was East Main Church. That was PCUSA, Presbyterian Church USA. They're both now outside of PCUSA. They're both in the new denominations. Was your wife Presbyterian? Is that why you were... She was. She was Presbyterian. And by the way, those two, PCUSA splintered up over kind of theological liberalism.

You know, issues like marriage, ordination, kind of all the usual issues. So I was there in a Presbyterian church for a while from probably 1995, 97 until 2005 when I came into the church and John Paul II was a major influence on that. So I could talk a lot more about why I became Catholic. If you want. Well, very good. Well, I want to talk, I want to talk, I want to get to the topic at hand, communism. So this past week I read the Communist Manifesto.

Oh, congratulations. That's wonderful, isn't it? Well, it's definitely more of a ra-ra poetic book than it is a philosophically precise book, isn't it? It's polemical. I mean, really I've heard people say, how would you best describe Marx? Because Marx is clearly not an economist. I mean that's for sure. Okay. In fact... What did he study? Because he's said to be an

economist. Well it's interesting too, you'll see this just getting ahead of that a little bit. At the universities today, when you hear of Marxist professors like Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, they had a 200th anniversary celebration of the birth of Marx in 2018. That was put on by the English department. Right? It's always like the critical theory department,

critical theory folks. Folks, it's not the economists, it's not the political scientists, it's not the historians, all right? I mean, though colleges, I mean, you will, at a lot of colleges, have that econ professor with a bust of marks in the office. But it's usually people in education, English,

departments like that. But if you read the Communist Manifesto, I mean, clearly, he knows squat about economics. I mean, it is more, frankly, it's kind of a diatribe, but he's very polemical. It's more philosophical. Marx fancied himself a poet. Marx wanted to be nothing less than,

wanted to be the Goethe of his age, write the Faust of his age. And that's where he kind of dabbled geta of his age, right? The Faust of his age. And that's where he, he, he kind of dabbled with some of his satanic poetry. That's quite chilling. When, when did communism become a word? When was that like, was it angles and Mark? It's a great question. It's a great question. It was 1840s, Richard pipes, who was the longtime Harvard professor emeritus of Russian

history he died in I think 2018 and I know him very well but he is so good on this subject his in fact his short book communism a history yeah is something I strongly recommend people say to me often is you're just like a hundred or two hundred page book and he and he describes their communism as an ideal, a program, and a regime. Which is a really good way to put it. But he said that the word communism was coined in Paris at some point in the 1840s, which seems to be true. Probably Marx and Engels met in Paris probably around 1844. So at that point communism exists and they formed something called the Communist League which is made up of 40 to 50 basically you know progressives white European males right and the guys

you're not supposed to like but Marx's wife was the only female in the group. But it was the Communist League, wasn't a party yet, and they decided we need a sort of programmatic statement of what the communists believe. So they created, they tasked to Marx and Ingalls. They were paid by that League, correct? Yeah, I don't know if they were paid or not. That's what I read. Yeah, but they probably were paid. And then they were paid to revise it, correct? Yeah, I don't know if they were paid or not. That's what I read. Yeah, but they probably were paid because- And then they were paid to revise it, I think.

Well, Marx was obsessed with money, which is really the irony of this. I mean- I want to just back up a sec before we get into this, because it's said that those who were unaware of history are doomed to repeat it. And I think sometimes we can be so familiar with the position, the insanity of it can be so apparent to us

that maybe we're kind of leaving people behind a little. There's bound to be people who are watching right now going, I don't even know what this thing is, where it came from, why anyone would find it appealing. So maybe before we get a little bit more complicated, can you just give us an overview? Well, let me finish this first. So they went to Marx and Engels and said, we need a kind of a what we believe statement. So they came up with, now first, they called it, there's a letter from Engels to Marx where Marx says,

Engels says to Marx, give a little more thought to our communist confession of faith. Wow. So they called it. Can you pause me that? Yeah, communist. Keep going, but. The communist confession of faith.

He said, I think we should drop the catechetical form and just call it the Manifesto. Okay. The Communist Manifesto. So they end up with this book that becomes the Communist Manifesto, which is published in 1848. Now this is a Catholic show. In 1846, Pope Pius IX issued the encyclical Qui Pluribus condemning communism. That's two years before the manifesto was even published. So communism existed before the manifesto was published in 1848. So that in itself shows that the idea had already been around. In fact, the opening words of the manifesto are that a specter is haunting Europe, The specter of communism. It says all the old powers of Europe, Pope and Tsar, Medernich, German radicals, others, are allied together

into a holy alliance to exorcise the specter. Let's hope. Yeah. So they describe it in this kind of specter, demonic, exorcise, exorcism language. So literal first words of the manifesto. I just want to read this one line to get to our point about it being a diatribe more than something philosophically precise. I mean, it's quite poetic. It talks about the bourgeoisie that have drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor

of chivalrous enthusiasm, of Philistine sentimentalism, and the icy water of egotistical calculation. Yeah. It makes you feel really smart when you say that. Well, he had a poison pen. He was an angry man and he could really, he could, he could, he could write. I mean, he's a, he's a polymoussus. He's an arguer, right? That's, that's what he was good at doing. If you want to kind of vitriolic hatchet man to, to make your, to make your case, that was Marx. So what is communism?

And say it in a way that a communist listening would go, yeah, I agree. Okay, here's the easiest way to say it that people can't argue with, all right? Let's say Marx and Engels gave us a definition. They gave us four words. They say in this book, they say the entire communist theory program may be summed up in a single sentence. Abolition of private property. So, that's it in a nutshell.

Now once you actually read the book, and you hear all the time, I get this from young people at college campuses around the country that, oh, communism's a pretty good idea if you just read it, if you just read the book. Have you read it? Yeah Well, you know, I've kind of looked around a little bit But I have but if you if you read it they're talking not just about abolition of private property They say that that's what it is. There's the word abolition of all religion all morality all eternal truths Quote abolition of the family exclamation mark even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists. That's verbatim.

They talk about abolishing money, capital, states, entire societies. Tell me why is this attractive to someone? Even if they haven't read it, that's okay. Whatever their bad idea of communism, why is that appealing to people? Today, I think it's utterly inexplicable how it could be attractive. Now in the 1840s, I think maybe the only thing you can say in defense of it is that Marx and Engels got right just how bad some of the effects were of the Industrial Revolution. Some of the abuses of workers

in the industrial revolution. But so did all kinds of people. I want you to stay on, I need you to steal me in the case. I have a little bit of pushback too, because not that I like communism. Yeah, you do! Bull crap! So the abolition of that private property,

that's just anarchism, right? Are these people anarchists or is there actual, because when I hear about communism, it's usually more like what is it creating as a, if we all pool our funds and stuff like that. Right, yeah, I mean, people think it's just about redistribution of the wealth, and in fact, if you look at some modern polls of younger people where they ask them, hey,

what do you think of communism? Right? And they'll say, well, I kind of like it, right? Like 40%. And they'll say, well, define what you think communism is. And they'll say, some polls literally say exactly this, right, from younger people. Oh, it's about people being kind to one another. It's about sharing. It's

about free stuff. But on the abolition point, these are bullet points on page 383 of my book, The Devil and Karl Marx, Marx in the Manifesto said that communism represents, quote, the most radical rupture in traditional relations. Now, right there, think about that. What is communism? Well, says Marx, it represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations. Now right there, think about that. What is communism? Well, says Marx, it represents the most radical rupture in traditional relations. So they knew how radical it was. Also said... Because until this time, he's essentially saying we're just rearranging furniture on the Titanic because capitalism poisons everything. Well, he says more than that. In the manifesto he and Ingalls write, the write the communism quote seeks to abolish the present state of things.

I mean, seeks to abolish the present state of things. Forcibly is the word he uses, right? Yeah, now here's the here's the kicker. Here's the money line, if you're pardon the expression. The close of the manifesto, everybody remembers the phrase workers of the world unite We have a world to win but the final paragraph where it says those things also says this The communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions Alright, so people that think that this is just about sharing the wealth and being kind enough,

they're saying in their book, they're calling for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. These guys aren't tinkerers. They're not just talking about cutting taxes or increasing tax rates or a few regulations or national healthcare, right? Forcible overthrow of all existing, and these guys do this all the time.

But wouldn't they say, whereas the capitalist says people are self-interested by nature, and therefore that's why capitalism is the way things ought to be, wouldn't they say, no, it's the other way around. Capitalism has made us self-interested and made us selfish and cruel, so we have to overthrow everything in order that something new can result from it. In order to start entirely anew. And really, Marx, that's where Marx was. In fact, he had, when Marx was asked if he had a favorite line, and people who knew Marx was asked if he had a favorite line, and people who knew Marx was asked if

he had a favorite line, I mean, you or I might cite a scripture verse or a quote from a saint or I'll say, yeah, John Paul II, be not afraid. Marx said, yes, Gertes Faust, the Mephistopheles character. Now, the Mephistopheles character is the demon, devil character in Faust. And the line was, everything that exists deserves to perish. Everything that exists deserves to perish. One of the biographers of Marx, Paine, says, you know, picture Marx, and you can see this in his poetry, kind of standing there in the smoldering ruins, the embers, right? Everything on fire, everything raised, R-A-Z-E-D, everything leveled and then saying, now we

can begin, right? Everything that exists deserves to perish. It's really. Forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. That's a philosopher. And he also, I mean, the main idea for those who haven't read it is this idea that there's this antagonism between two major classes the oppressor and the oppressed. This is written to the oppressed. Right.

He seems to be assuming that the oppressors are holy evil and the oppressed are good, just kind, empathetic. That's right. And that even though they're going to have to take the place of the bourgeoisie, they won't keep it for long, and they'll eliminate all the systems that have caused this antagonism. Which just seems so insane. That would never happen. Well, that's right. Yeah, and he had, and the irony of that is that Marx had a very negative view of people.

In fact, he referred to what he called the lumpen proletariat. And Marx's charming definition was this, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountbacks, lazaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.

And I'm even talking here about his views of blacks. This is where the bourgeoisie came from, he's saying. That's what he called the lumpen proletariat. What does that mean, lumpen? Well, it kind of translates into kind of rag vagabond. He uses all kinds of people, he applies it in a really broad way. But you see there his kind of very demeaning view of the common man.

And this is a criticism of Marx that you'll hear even from some people who aren't as anti-Marx as I am. He never visited the factory floor. I mean, Marx wrote all this stuff from, you know, like a library in Britain, or from his apartment as he rested on his carbuncles. He has a famous phrase to Ingalls that at least maybe the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles. You know, he had these violent outbursts of rage because he was infected by these boils on his backside, on his penis. And the doctors came in all to try to figure out what's he suffering from? No one else in the

family seems to be picking this up. The main reason was probably that Marx never bathed. He refused to take a bath. Why? He was a really dirty guy and his wife, this really depressed his wife and his mother, his parents cut him off. My wife would be pretty depressed if I knew that. Right, right. Parents cut him off and so at that point he got all of his money from Ingalls and Ingalls's family's inheritance. The irony here too, we'll talk about this. He wants to abolish inheritance. He wants to abolish all right of inheritance. Marx completely lives from inheritance. So how in this case isn't Engels the bourgeoisie and he the proletariat? Quick question, how do you even make that distinction? Is it those who are paying a wage for somebody else's time and work and creativity, are those the bourgeoisie? Like the owners of factories?

How did he make the distinction? Well, that's a good point because this binary kind of, you're in the proletariat of the bourgeoisie is just an incredible simplification. It's kind of like modern critical race theorists, right? Where you're the black or white. You're the guys or the bad guys, yeah. Right, and whichever you are defines you guys. Yeah. Which one? Right.

And whichever you are defines you and puts you in a box as if you think a certain way and act a certain way. So he's really just- You can totally see this in BLM. I mean, that last line about the overthrowing of the current structure and to bring about some dreamed of utopian equality. I mean, if you were just to read that line and say, where does this apply in the United States over the last 10 years?

Well, obviously BLM. We can get to that. Yeah. And that's the Marxist framework. Now the Marxist framework was Martin Malia, who was a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and actually wrote the best preface to the Communist Manifesto. This is in the Penguin Classics version. And Malia, he was probably more like a moderate Democrat, sort of.

I don't know that he was very conservative, but he really understood Marx very well. He said, for Marx, the proletariat is both the victim class and the redeemer class. By the stripes of the proletariat shall we be healed. That's what I got from reading it. And there's kind of like a via del croce, a way of the cross, right, that the proletariat was going through. But, and Lenin said this, all the others have said it, all the Marxists through the 1960s said it, the proletariat's consciousness had to be raised.

They had to be taught that they were the suffering class. They had to be informed of this. Mark Rudd, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, said, it used to frustrate us. We would go into the working class areas of Chicago and New York and Pittsburgh to the Italian kids, the Polish kids, us kids from Columbia, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dorn, and we were trying to tell them how repressed they were. But they're all like Italian and Polish Catholics, and they're saying, get out of here, you commies,

and they beat us up, right? You know, the Greasers didn't want anything to do with us. So the educated elite are standing there saying, do you not understand how oppressed you are, right? And of course, they want nothing to do with communism, but the proletariat needs to understand that it's the victim class which will serve

as the redeemer class. So they will usher in the revolution. Now the Marxist framework ever hereafter for all modern-day Marxists, including Marxists in culture, is to always look for that new victim class. So the victim class according to gender Marxists might be women. The victim class for critical race theorists, the Marxist-based CRT advocates, would be blacks, right? And so blacks have to be informed that they are repressed. Even if you're talking to someone like Oprah Winfrey, right? Or somebody, or you know, an NBA player. Like, why does't feel repressed at all? I vote Republican, I want lower tax cuts.

And they're like, no, no, you are repressed because of the color of your skin. And that guy over there who might be white and might be homeless, he's your repressor, right? Whether you realize it or not, which is again, the absurdity and the incredible simplification that these guys engage in, which is something that Catholicism

and Christianity doesn't do, right? I mean, we are all individuals made in the Imago Dei, the image of God. You know, we were not born into groups. This hammers everyone into groups. Wyatt T. Walker, who was a close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., said, you know, critical race theory came after King, who was shot in April 1968, but he would have absolutely rejected any sort of theory that put people into categories or groups and defined them that way. Because King said, you are judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin. So you don't define people that way.

But that's what these guys did and they were willing to launch revolutions and Abolish and clean out entire societies in order to get there well So, I mean if it weren't for Marx and Engels other people would have been writing on this I suppose but I don't I don't Well Okay to some extent. Yeah, I mean there's a category, my friend Dan Flynn, one of my fellow columnists at the American Spectator, if I can give a plug for the American Spectator, I'm the editor of American Spectator.

Yeah, please do, we'll put a link in the description below. Spectator.org. But Dan, Dan Flynn did a book called Intellectual Morons, and his argument was that how ideology can make you stupid, how it can force people who are otherwise very intelligent to go for these really bad ideas because ideology kind of pushes them in there. But he talks about the Yankee utopians. In America from the 1820s to 1840s were all sorts of socialists who preceded Marx Who were engaging in this there was a guy?

Welsh British Scottish Robert Owen was his name and he founded a what people have called a communist colony in New Harmony, Indiana In 1826 and this is a crazy thing Neil You could look it up and post it maybe, and this is the kind of thing we ought to be learning in our schools. Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana, on July 4th, 1826. So it's the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I got to ask you, I don't mean to embarrass you as a non-American, do you know who died in America on July 4th, 1826?

No. you as a non-American, do you know who died in America on July 4th 1826? Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, which is amazing because Jefferson wrote the Declaration and Adams chose him to write the Declaration. Adams was 90 years old, Jefferson was 83. This was gonna be America's Jubilee. The whole country is watching, right? Are they gonna make it to July 4th? They made it and the whole country was celebrating. But as that's going on, Robert Owen, this British socialist, stands there at his ideological colony, which is a great phrase of Pope Francis, in New Harmony, Indiana, and he declares what he calls his Declaration of Mental Independence, where he declares war on what he calls the three-headed hydra of property, religion, and marriage.

So right there, he's going after exactly what Marx and all the communists are going to go after. So would there have been others who would have come along and come? Yeah, probably, I guess. But the conditions were such that what Marx and Engels did lit a spark and it did. And I would say this to Marxist today who say, well, you know, there's something we could learn from this book, right? I mean, he got right.

The factory conditions in the 1840s. Well, okay. But I got news for you, dude. Look out your window. All right. This is 2022. All right. window. This is 2022, and you're not looking out your window at 1848, Britain, France, and Germany. This was written for an era that does not exist and is completely gone, which is why today,

Marxists that you see today aren't talking about classical Marxism. They're not talking about abolishing private property. Bernie Sanders doesn't talk about that. They're talking about classical Marxism. They're not talking about abolishing private property. Bernie Sanders doesn't talk about that, right? They're talking about they're borrowing other elements of it to call for maybe Nationalization of health care maybe something to do with unions But most of today's Marxists are applying it at a cultural gender and even racial area If you go to people's World, which is the successor publication to The Daily Worker, they say we are looking for culture workers, not factory workers, not coal miners from West Virginia, not steel workers from

Steubenville and Pittsburgh, right? They're looking for culture workers. They're looking to fight for LGBTQ. They're looking to fight to redefine marriage. So today's Marxists, really, very few of them have anything to do with what these guys were thinking about in the 1840s. Marx couldn't have conceived of same-sex marriage or transgenderism. But today's Marxists, that's where they are. Yeah, it would seem to me that someone, say, on a university campus who gets a whiff of socialism would say, look, there's incredible inequality in the world. There are very rich people, there are very poor people, this seems unfair.

Socialism is about making it fair. And they might even say, look, even when you read the book of Acts, isn't it funny how it's always the atheists who quote the Bible before the Christian whenever they're trying to make an un-Christian doctrine. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. And they would say, gee, that sounds a lot like socialism. How could this be a problem? Let's just implement this on a nation-wide level and call it a Christian nation.

What's the problem with that? Three problems with that. One is Christian with Marx, which Marx rejected. I love that you like three problems like you haven't been asked this before. It believes in God, which Marx rejected. He was an atheist. It talks about selling your possessions. How can you sell your possessions if you don't have private property to begin with? Very good. These people are voluntarily on their own for the purposes of the church, the good of Christianity, voluntarily giving of themselves and being willing to share their property.

Communism is a state run regime by fiat and the power of the state by gun and gulag, forcibly taking money and possessions from everybody regardless of whether or not they wanna do it. And in the name of materialistic atheism of all things. So it's got nothing to do with that. So you get all the time these kind of you know soft-headed silly religious left Christians will say, wow the communist manifesto talks about sharing and so does the Bible. It's just like the Bible,

you know. No, I mean just because there's one or two elements of commonality in something doesn't mean... No, they rejected the Bible. Mark said, Christianity preaches cowardice. It preaches sacrifice. It preaches humiliation. He said of Judaism, the Israelite faith is repulsive to me. Communism begins where atheism begins. Where was that quote from? Which one? Communism begins where atheism begins. Communism begins where atheism begins. It's a quote that's originally written in French. In fact, Fulton Sheen uses that in Communism in the Conscience of the West, Fulton Sheen's 1948 book. Who said that like Christianity or religion is like necrophilia?

Was that Lenin? That was Lenin, yeah. And so what was the context of that? What did he mean by that? Yeah, Lenin said there is nothing more abominable than religion. All worship of divinity is a necrophilia. He said religion is a kind of medieval mildew, a spiritual booze. It is the opiate of the masses. It was Lenin who said it. Lenin said that but Lenin quoting Marx. Lenin said like Marx said it's the opiate of the masses and if you look at Marx's actual opiate of the masses essay, he says in there, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a

heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. So sometimes you'll hear people on our side say, well, I can see what Marx meant. I mean, religion and opium of the people, it's kind of like a drug, like a crutch. You know, as Christians we believe it's a proper one, a real one, right? It's not like a placebo, so I see what he's getting. But if you read the whole context, right? It's not like a placebo, so I see what he's getting. But if you read the whole context, no, religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the obiate of the masses.

And he says in that essay as well, and this is kind of profound, I'll give Mark's credit on this one, Mark said, the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism. What does that mean? So if you want to really begin all criticism and criticize everything else... You've got to do it from the root and this is it. Yeah, exactly right. You've got to go after God, which is why they were hell bent on going after religion. The only word that Mark uses more than criticism is abolition, and those words are all through that opiate of the masses essay. So he got that right.

You know, they knew that if you wanted to burn down the village and start all over, you had to take out God, because this is first and foremost a manifesto or an attack on human nature. Pope Benedict XVI, John Paul II, popes all the way back to Pope Pius IX, said, especially Benedict and JP too, they said where Marxism really failed isn't even so much philosophical, isn't so much economic, it's anthropological.

They fail to understand human nature. Such as if your beginning point is that the entire communist program may be summed up in a single sentence, abolition of private property? I mean think about that. What does that mean? You're in a classroom where some German guy is writing this on the board. Professor, can you stop for a second? Abolition of private property. Quick question. Yeah.

Yeah. What does that mean? Right? The Ten Commandments, thou shalt not steal, implies the right to own property. Natural law talks about private property. From the cave to the courthouse, a Judeo-Christian tradition, you have the right to property.

If you're going to try to abolish all private property, I can tell you right now, I mean, a five-year-old walking in here with one of those little propeller hats and all lollipop could tell you they're going to have to kill 100 million people if they want to abolish private property. I mean, you're going to have a war on your hands. So bad starting point right there. In the Republic when they try to figure out what justice is they talk about seeing it a I think on a larger level. I want to do something similar here with maybe rather than thinking of

the state what would communism look like if we had a little commune? So suppose there's some zombie apocalypse and everybody in here, we find a little group of houses and we're trying to figure out how we can live peaceably together. I'm wondering, like, what does communism look like in that point? Like, do we all have to agree? Because that's the thing, we won't all agree. Someone's going to have to tell us that we're all going to agree that all of this is going to be owned collectively, right? But and even then a commune is not actually

Communism because your commune is probably something you're joining voluntarily, right? You might have marriage and family in there. You might have religion in there. You might have religious people in there You don't have all these various things that Marx wants to abolish on the level of entire societies and states. I'm agreeing with you because what I'm saying is even in that situation you're going to have somebody from the top down imposing those beliefs on you that they won't be religion, that they won't be marriage presumably, that they won't be... Yeah. And you can see how horrific that would be in that small setting and then you just have to apply that to a nation or the world. One of the early Yankee utopians, John Humphrey Noyes, who was kicked out of New England by the Puritans, he's like the only one who was religious.

He called himself a Bible communist, which shows the danger of all this. He ended up forming the Oneida Colony in Oneida, New York. They make famous silverware. In fact, one of the only reasons that that utopian colony didn't go bankrupt is they actually had something to sell. But he was redefining marriage. They were doing group marriages, they were doing collective marriages, and they had younger girls being forced to marry older men, which the younger girls didn't like.

But right away, they're trying to reinvent marriage. So he's applying his communism on a sort of cultural level. And again, all of this is really disastrous when you break out of traditional relations, right? He called it the most radical rupture in traditional relations. Once you start tinkering with and taking down these ideas that have been the bulwark of human beings for thousands of years,

it gets ugly. It gets messy. Now one of the things he says in the manifesto is that, yeah, we want to do away with marriage. It seems that he says that, but he says, but look at how y'all engage. Look at how the bourgeoisie engage in marriage. You basically prostitute each other in any way, treat each other like capital, sleep with each other's wives. What was his point in saying that? Was it just that, yes, we're trying to do away with marriage, but you've done away with marriage too or what?

Yeah, he does a lot of that. In fact, on property, which I'll answer that too, but it's kind of, it illustrates the point really well. Yeah, so he even says in the property issue, he says, the theory of the communist may be summed up in a single sentence, abolition of private property. And you think to yourself,

he doesn't really wanna abolish private property. That's what I'm doing. Well, then he says this, you are horrified and are intending to do away with private property. Yes. And you're thinking, yeah, you're thinking at that point, yeah, you're thinking, yeah, we are, and you don't really mean that, right?

And he says, precisely so, that is just what we intend. And then he doubles down on it, he says it again, and then he goes into one of his diatribes, but the property is already owned by blah, blah, blah. That's right. And well, some of these things, first of all, it's a vast exaggeration, right? Vast exaggeration, all right? Or all kinds of people had private property. And you find too that a lot of the poor,

which I had been at one point in my life, I didn't have any money at one point when I was in graduate school in the 1990s. Most people, including those, the greasers in Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Chicago, is that Mark Rudd? Oh, you know what that is? So greasers was like a term for

1950s kind of working-class kids, you know, the sons of steel workers and so forth. But they all want private property and they all want to aspire to make a buck. You know, they don't want to demand that the rich guy down the street give them all their money. I mean, why would you go to school and better yourself and borrow money? And most people actually want to work their way up. And a lot, these guys assume that whatever the proletariat and the poor are,

are like stuck there forever. It kind of, it's sort of a helpless view of pathetic, lumpenproletariat humanity. If we don't come in to help these slack-jawed rabble, they're just going to be walking around drooling all over themselves. Most people, in fact, want freedom. Most people want private property. The idea that a group of individuals could come along and say, literally to hell with

that, we're gonna burn it all down because this person has more money than that person or whatever else. So what, you already believe that, they already have that. You already treat your lives like prostitutes anyway. Okay, then we should abolish marriage. Great, right?

Because of whatever's happening with however some of the bourgeois wives are treated. By the way, Mark's there is talking about his wife, who behind her back. His back? Yeah, behind his wife's back. Oh, I see. He bedded the housemaid, Lenchen,

who was lent to Marks' family by Marks' wife, Jenny's mom. Jenny grew up with this girl named Lenchen. Maybe you can find a photo of Lenchen and put it up there. And how do you spell it? L-E-N-C-H-E-N. Lenchen. So Jenny grows up with Lenchen. The Marx family is so broke. Jenny and Marx's wife both expressed the wish that quote Carl would start earning some capital rather than just writing about it So the family has given him as much money as they possibly can because marks won't earn any money This book is written for someone like marks who could have the state give him all of his money All right, so he's not earning any money and the family can't in good conscience

No one could give him any more money because he just squanders it And the family can't in good conscience, no one could give him any more money because he just squanders it. He drinks a bottle of booze, whatever he does with it. So the family says, okay, we'll lend them Lenchin. So they lend them Lenchin, the family nursemaid. She becomes the Marx family's nursemaid. And Marx had sex with her. Who doesn't bathe. Who doesn't bathe, right? Got her pregnant. One of the Marx biographers, Payne, thinks that it wasn't consensual, but I don't know how he could know that.

She got pregnant. She had a child. Marx denied that the child was his. Everyone knew that the child was Marx's, including Marx's wife, Jenny. This really crushed Jenny. This really crushed Jenny. Ingalls being Marks' sugar daddy and kind of sap who doesn't believe in marriage and who lives with women and refuses to marry any of the women that he lives with and these poor women all want Ingalls to marry them to make you know to make honest women out of them. So

Ingalls says, all right I know it's Carl's kid. I know it's Carl's kid. I will accept paternity for the child, and we will name him Friedrich. And the kid became known as Freddie. Marx refused to ever acknowledge the existence of the kid, refused to ever pay a penny of child support, and Marx also refused to ever pay Lenchin any money. So she never got any money.

This champion of the proletariat never paid any money to Lenchin at all. Typical of kind of Marx family values. Ingalls and Marx wrote in the origins of the family that in their ideal society, housekeeping would become a government run industry, a nationalized affair. And all children would immediately be put into government collective schools.

One of the first things that Bolsheviks did in the Soviet Union was abolish all private schools, all homeschooling, and all religious education, and put everyone in the giant secular collective schools. Point 10 of the Communist Manifesto calls for free education for all children in public schools. Marx made fun of what he called the hallowed correlation between parent and child. He said that's a bunch of bourgeois claptrap. But see, after he says free education for all children in public schools, he says abolition

of children's factory labor in its present form. So that could be seen as children are being sent to these factories. We need to educate them. Yeah, sure. Is it the more sympathetic way of looking at it? Yeah, I think so. And in America, right, any progressives watching, the progressive movement in the early 1900s, one of the things that they did best was eliminate child labor and had regulations. Woodrow Wilson, who was an intensely anti-communist progressive

So the point is you can fix child child abuse and labor without becoming a communist, right? You know, you don't have to abolish the family all eternal truth morality all states all societies and private property and everything else To take care of that issue there. So again, so we marks to get that right. But yeah, I have some, some more devil's advocate to play. Yeah, sure. Mark's love would love that. Okay. So it seems that the, these as it's being presented today, I'm starting a different way. Okay. So basically when I think of the communist manifesto, what's interesting to me is not marks as a person and,

and his life and his philosophy, because it seems to me is not Marx as a person and and your life and his philosophy because it seems to me It's not really been a philosophical book. What's interesting to me is how did this Manifesto spread the way it did what appealed to the heart of the reader Why is the human heart such that this is such an appealing ideal and then my other? question I guess would be, it seems like in the conversation so far communism is being presented as this great abolition of private property which we've already talked about as kind of like you have to have a government, you have to have some kind of system, you can't really have no such thing as property.

Maybe it's public property but if that's what communism, then kind of what are we criticizing here? Is that what people who call themselves communists want? They want no more private property? Do they want no system of government? Do they want everyone to be pushed into some warehouse and taught states rules until they're 18 and then... Like what would a communist be? One of the things that Lenin wrote, and so it really becomes Marxism-Leninism when it's

first implemented, but Lenin said, now don becomes Marxism-Leninism when it's first implemented. But Lenin said, now don't think that when we talk about abolition of private property and public property and common ownership of means of production, this actually means that people are going to own all the stuff. The state is obviously going to run it. I mean that's the way that it's going to work. Lenin wrote a famous essay called What is to be Done? Which is the great question.

Yeah, what do you do once you abolish all the private property? And if you're not going to have a state, or the state withers away and ceases to exist, who's going to redistribute all the stuff? This doesn't just magically happen, right? Who's going to be in charge? And Lenin, step four, said, well, of course, what this means is you're gonna need a vanguard. You're gonna need a kind of educated, elite, class, or group.

Not only to raise the consciousness of the proletariat and everybody else, but in order to have the power to do all of this. And you're also gonna need, because there are these dialectical stages in the revolution, you're gonna need somebody to call the shots at a certain point and say, okay, okay, okay, okay, we've now left serfdom, and we've now left feudalism, and we've now left capitalism.

We're now in socialism. We're now on our final transitionary step to communism. Here we are now, and now we do this. You're gonna need people to make those decisions and call those shots, but if you read Marx, there's just this kind of magic withering away. It's really almost religious, the way these things happen. Here, this is one of my favorite quotes from Marx that I think says it all. from Marx that I think says it all. In communist society where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each one can become accomplished in any

branch he wishes, now listen to this very carefully, alright? Society regulates the general production, got it? Okay, society regulates the general production, okay? And thus, okay, it's all you need. What happens after society regulates a general production. Okay, okay, and thus Okay, it's all you need what happens after society regulates general production and Thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow to hunt in the morning Fish in the afternoon rear cattle in the evening Criticize after dinner just as I have a mind without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic. To do all that, to be a hunter, a fisherman, a farmer,

we're cattle herding, all you need is for society to regulate general production. And that's the key to utopia. So if we could just have this elite group of managers, right, that could do this, everything will be alright. You will have the new Jerusalem. There's a stunning statement from Margaret Sanger. It's like parents taking care of children. It's like we'll take care of everything and you, son and daughter, will be free to do

the things that you wish to do. But you have to trust us. Right. We're allowed to impose certain things upon you and discipline you. Whoever the thus may be. And then however they come into being, however they come into power. Um, Margaret Sanger made a trip to Bolshevik Russia in 1934. She wrote about it in her birth control review and it's called birth control in

Soviet Russia. And she was stunned at the number of abortions that were taking place in Moscow. She couldn't believe it. She was actually horrified by it. Wow. And she said, however, of all the communist officials that I spoke to, they say that once a fully functioning communist society is in place, neither abortion nor birth control will be necessary.

So all you need is the fully functioning communist society in place. And then you won't even need abortion. Why? Because people are sharing with each other and there's no scarcity. Because these hypothetical angels, right, these like perfect, almost Edenic managers. Godians, yeah. Yeah, they will, because they're using the ideology of communism, will make everything good.

It's like Benedict said, it's like they would usher in the New Jerusalem. And Pope Benedict said, what Marx really got wrong is he thinks that if you solve the economic problem all other problems will be solved, but the mistake that he made is as Jesus said to Satan, man does not live by bread alone. You know, Augustine said there's a God-shaped vacuum in each of us, there's not a dollar-shaped vacuum in each of us. Marx and Engels believed if we could just solve the capital problem, or wait a second, the private property problem, or no, no, no, the family, marriage, all eternal truths, all

traditional relations, all society, whether all those problems, right? If we could just solve all of that, right, then we will have the New Jerusalem. I think I can answer your first question, which is why is this so appealing to people? I think it's because it locates the evil of the world to some other group of people than me. So if I, if I am so disappointed with my life and I feel frustrated because I haven't been able to actualize what I want, and then you come along and say, it's not your fault. It's their fault. All of a sudden I have this community of people to rally with and then to inflict pain on

the evil that's... You're the victim and they're the bad guys. Yeah, I said how could you not see how that's appealing? So it fosters envy. It fosters resentment. Envy is appealing. Yeah, that's right. It's based on vice, viciousness.

There's no virtue in there. And the first question you had asked too about why would it appeal to people? I don't think it ever really has and and the There I mean there are not democratically elected communist regimes. I mean the Bolsheviks took over in October 1917 Only because the Tsar had abdicated and the provisional government collapse read Richard pipes the Russian Revolution, people were shocked that the Bolsheviks took over. And then by force, you know,

through the Soviet commentary, they tried, they tried taking over countries. And of all the countries that became communist, none of them stood for for democratic elections. Cuba under Fidel Castro and Raul Castro, they've never stood for elected leadership. I mean Castro promised in January 1959, came to United States April 17 1959, told Meet the Press and Congress and all these other groups we are for democracy, we are for free and fair elections. They've never held free elections because they know that people wouldn't elect them. And by the way, knowing that if they knew that people would elect them, they would stand

for elections and then get elected. And then that would help them. They could end the embargo and all sorts of things. But these are all totalitarian dictatorial regimes. Pol Pot, Castro, the Kims in North Korea, Mao, all the countries behind the Iron Curtain. So that should tell people something too. Name me the communist regime that's not a dictatorship. When you look at the ideas that are in here, you say to yourself, you're only going to be able to abolish private property and do

these other things through a dictatorship. Yeah, through a new position of force. It's common sense. Yeah, unless everybody just decides force. It's common sense. Yeah. Yeah. Through force. Unless everybody just decides to give it up. And that's the difference between a monastery, right? Like in a monastery, you willingly give away your property and choose to submit to an elder and to share things in common.

And it's based on religion. You also have freedom of religion. That's right. That's right. How important was the thought of Hegel in that of Marx? Because he was a contemporary of religion. That's right. That's right. How important was the thought of Hegel in that of Marx? Because he was a contemporary Marx. He lived prior to him. I've heard that the Hegelian dialect somehow influenced him. I'm also seeing, though, that he's a contemporary of Darwin and Nietzsche.

And there seems to be a common strand of thought throughout these characters. And I wonder if you agree and if you could explicate that. Yeah. wow. They love Darwin. In fact, Engels at Marx's funeral in 1883 quoted Darwin in his eulogy, and he said that Marx has done for the social sciences what Darwin did for the social sciences, right, what Darwin did for the natural sciences. So he's applied this evolutionary idea using Hegel's idea of the dialectic, which is really just kind of a fancy way of saying that history over time would go through these progressive

stages kind of one after another, each happening on a higher plane that eventually evolves into this kind of one after another, each happening on a higher plane, that eventually evolves into this kind of final destination. For Hegel, it was this ideational dialectic. For Marx, it was this materialistic dialectic based on economics. So Ingalls said the glory of Marx is that he has, they call the scientific socialism or scientific communism, to try to put this veneer of science to what Marx was doing. So history is not progressing through this kind of series of stages and the idea, the Christian idea, that all eventually leads to the second coming of Christ, but instead

this atheistic materialist dialectic that goes on stage over stage over over time. And so Marx quoted Darwin or Engels quoted Darwin at Marx's funeral. Engels quoted Darwin at Marx's wife Jenny's funeral and gives us really depressing eulogy about here's you know here lived the vivacious Jenny, right? So full of life and there he is kind of brooding over her coffin, right? Now she becomes, I don't know, what do you say, Matt, worm food, right? How wonderful, how uplifting that is. But they all, they were all Darwinists.

Trotsky, who was the cohort of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik Revolution, said, "'The idea of evolution and determinism "'took possession of me completely. "'Darwin stood for me like a mighty doorkeeper "'at the entrance of the temple of the universe. "'I was intoxicated by his thought.'" And here's Marx himself in his 1844 essay, Private Property and Communism.

Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man. Just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science, there will be one science. So he saw what he was doing as scientific, fully rational, but in a way this is more religious than a lot of religions. Ronald Reagan used to say communism, that religion of theirs. Raymond Aaron called it Marxism, the opium of the intellectuals.

But this idea that Arthur Kessler in darkness at noon and the God that failed, he was an ex-communist, and he said you got to understand for the convert to communism, it's like all the pieces of the universe suddenly fall into place. And you know there is no leaving the faith, right? There's this rapturous joy that you've solved all the riddles of the universe. I don't know how anybody could feel that way about communism, but a lot of these people, these atheistic adherents did. And you know, at the same time, the irony is they've made fun of religious people and called them idiots

and morons, but they're just as religious as your Catholic grandmother working her rosary. I mean, these guys are really, they put all their faith in this kind of earthly utopia. Have you ever read The Devils by Dostoevsky? There's a great deal of talk of communism there. And he's almost, I mean, right on par. They were born a few years apart between him and Marx. So was this revolution taking place in Russia while he's writing The Devils sparked by Marx?

Well, yeah, I mean, there was a lot going on in Russia throughout the 1800s. I have to look up when Dostoevsky, this is like 1880s, right? Well, let's see, so Marx was born in 1818. Dostoevsky was born in 1821. Yeah, yeah, right. And when did Dostoevsky die?

1881. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so he, so- And Marx is 1883. Right, that, right. And when did Dostoevsky die? 1881. Okay, yeah. Yeah, so he, so... And Marx is 1883. Right, that's right. And the Manifesto was published in 1848. Ingalls, I think, died in 1895. So all of this is going on at the time. And again, the Church, right? I mean, the Catholic Church is issuing statement after statement. Pope Bius IX did Quipuribus in 1846, did several other encyclicals, and then Leo XIII in 1878, and on to 1903. A whole bunch of statements as well. And Pius X listed it in his Syllabus of Errors.

They referred to communism as pestilential, pests, just the strongest language. The 1937 Pius XI encyclical Divini Redemptoris called communism a Satanic scourge orchestrated by the sons of darkness and said the communism was demonic. Which pope was it? Maybe Leo XIII who said you cannot be a Catholic and a socialist. That was Pope Pius XI and Quadra JC Moana in 1931. One cannot be at the same time a socialist and a Catholic. Yeah, the two are incompatible. Now I think what bothers people when we go after communism is they think that we're necessarily extolling capitalism in all of its forms and Celebrating all of its outcomes. Exactly. Now John Paul the second in Sentence emus annus. Yeah, you say it which which was done on the hundredth anniversary of

Leo the 13th's rarem novarum, right? That's what that means a 100 years since henceforth. And Quadra JC Moana was 40 years after Rerum Novarum. I want to quote- Those three are all connected. I want to quote paragraph 42, because the first thing is often kind of cited by those who would champion capitalism. He says, can it perhaps be said that after the failure of communism, capitalism is the

victorious social system and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society. If by capitalism is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property, and the resulting responsibility for the means of production

as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a business economy, market economy, or simply free economy. And this one short quote, because then he says this, but if by capitalism is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework, which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom

The core of which is ethical and religious and the reply is certainly negative So maybe help those who are listening who have Questions, maybe not even full-out critiques, but just questions about capitalism. Yeah, but yeah It's a beautiful statement and I'm so glad you brought this up because for anyone who, everyone says, well, you're a capitalist. I'm not a capitalist. I mean, I've heard people say that Marx invented the term capitalism. I don't know. I don't think, I don't know. I don't know for sure, but the idea that you and I might be capitalist,

what do we like worship capital? I don't? I don't care about capital. I mean, what is capital? Money, property? What does capital mean? I think it might refer to, in his sense, as maybe the means of production, maybe factories, farms, things that are owned, currency, perhaps, right? I don't know. You have to really drill down on what more, actually, Das Kapitel, right? I mean mean he talks about it, but the thing is I tell people all the time, I'm not a capitalist. I mean I'm just kind of a general free marketer. I believe in private property and freedom to engage in commerce, right? Free exchange of ideas, currency,

the right to start a business, lower regulations, lower taxes. And I'm not against the state doing some things to help the poor, social security, workers' comp, welfare even, right? But limited to a certain amount of time, you know, maybe like two years or so. I'm not against those things, but so they often set up a caricature, right, and call

it capitalism and kind of contrast their communism to that. But I don't know anybody really, even including my Wall Street friends who call themselves capitalists, right? They're kind of general free marketers. So I think that in itself is a straw man that they've gotten away with. They've tried to take, I think, what most of us would consider ourselves free marketers and accuse us of following this ism. No, they're the ism people.

They're doing communism. They're doing Marxism-Leninism. But given that modern day communists wouldn't ascribe to much of what Marx said, aren't we straw manning them by focusing so much on Marx instead of dealing with what they believe today? Well, yeah, I mean, we could deal with their arguments and their points and their beliefs on separate issues. And in fact, all right alright to sort of bring this forward to today, today Communist Party USA which was founded in Chicago September 1919 which at its

peak had about 60,000 members in the 1930s. There's debates on this 50,000 to 100,000 but there's an FBI report from 1948 which really did a deep dive and said about 60,000 communists in the United States. By the way it said 30,000, but there's an FBI report from 1948, which really did a deep dive and said about 60,000 communists in the United States. By the way, it said 30,000 of them lived in New York City alone. One of them was Bella Dodd, we can talk about later. But so there are about 60,000 communists. Today Communist Party USA has about 5,000 members.

That's it. Out of 300 million people in this country, 5,000 members. But where the action is is the group called the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA. And they have, according to their most recent convention report, 94,512 comrades, as they call them. And if you go to the website of the Democratic Socialists of America, they call themselves quote the largest socialist organization in the United States unquote. They have not changed that.

That's been up there on the on the lead website for 10 years now. By the way, the DSA was founded by a Catholic, Michael Harrington in the 1980s. And today, if you follow the DSA, they're very secular, if not, they don't say that they're atheistic, but they're not Catholic for sure. I mean, they're not religious. Coming out of the DSA is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, Cory Bush, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. The most far left members of Congress are DSA members who have now been running for office as Democrats. So they're crafting what they call democratic socialism, which is...

Put the best possible spin on that before you critique it. How would she define that? They define it at their website. And if you... I don't know if you have it handy Well, I'm here. Let's see about us. Yeah about is democratic socialism. All right. All right He I'll stop every few sentences and you can say what you think Capitalism is a system Designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. Okay, now stop right there

All right. So is that us? class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. Okay, now stop right there. So is that us? Are we, America, a capitalist system? Where what? The owning class? Yeah, who is the owning class? Well, the owning class in America is probably all these people. Believe me, it's AOC.

Those people, they have money. Bernie Sanders has money. Bernie Sanders has money. Bernie Sanders has, you know, homes. I mean, a lot of the owning class in America today is, you know, teachers and people who have pensions and their pensions are based on what they own through what's invested in Wall Street. It's so simplistic, isn't it? It's so simplistic.

The only class to exploit the rest of us. Now if you're reading that, you're like, yeah, that's me. I'm the rest of us. Right, right. Definitely not one of those dirty capitalists. Yeah. I don't feel, whoever those dirty guys are, would it be Elon Musk, Buffett? I don't feel any antagonism toward those guys at all.

They have a literal gazillion more dollars than me. Great, I don't care. I'm not upset about it, are you? Well, we're not upset about it, but we're not, you know, we're not in any way destitute. Neither of the people writing this, but I mean maybe I'd be a little more upset if I had no money and thought I had no options. I might then look at people who had insane amount of money. I think shows how divisive these people are because they go to that guy and say, you know, this isn't your fault. This is the fault of these,

this capitalist scum, right? The owning class. You've got a great voice. When you said capitalist scum, I think, I would like you to do a bedtime story where you read the communist manifesto and and we put it on Hallow. Right, right. You have a lot of Maryland. These capitalist reptiles. All right, let's see. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, that's not me. I'm not ordinary. No. Have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods and society. That's you know, what does that mean? What is that? I suppose what I want to see, I'm a business guy, right? I don't own a business, but I have more of a business mind. What do you mean by that?

What does that look like? Yeah. Well, go ahead. Who's it speaking to? Is it speaking to people who feel that they have no power in their local area? But the one thing that helped that is top down government dictatorship. Like that's the opposite of subsidy. What's the voice? What's the voice? And not just a voice, a real voice, a real voice. So basically maybe what they're saying is these big bureaucracies. And I, I, maybe I can relate to this. Like you have a voice. Right. Yeah.

We really value your feedback. No, you don't. Yeah. At all. I would say the bigger the government and the more government control, the more you feel like you don't have a voice. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, the more freedom you have and the more right to own private property, um, in a sense, the more responsibility you have over the thing that you own. Right. Right. Rather than having a managerial class that redistributes it. We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind

authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history. Okay, what does that mean there? Well, the dustbin of history is Lenin's famous phrase, but yeah, authoritarian. You're going to need authoritarian control to do socialism. Are you? Cause they're saying you don't. That's the way it is. I mean, it says it's going to leave behind the authoritarian visions of socialism. So is that a critique of socialism there? Is that what that is?

I think, I think they're thought up by Marx and they, they are, um, they're, they're criticizing their their how they want to frame up. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history. We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish, not just survive and answers the fundamental question of our lives with the input of all. Okay.

I don't know if I want everybody answering the fundamental question of my life. And even then a lot of that, those are just sort of, those are just sort of Fluffy words. Yeah. They're general platitudes. That's kind of general language that yeah, I want to know what does that mean? What? Okay. So, you know, I want to know what tax rates do you want to do that?

Give me, we have a progressive income tax in the United States and the upper rate is around 39%. What would you like that to be to do that? I say, and I bet they say, Oh, like 80 to 90%. And what can I give it? Yeah. Give us some specifics. This would I don't know. I know Bernie Sanders isn't really in the limelight anymore, but would he be the kind of poster child for this?

You see, he would. Yeah. And so how did he kind of respond to those very specific questions about how much do you want to tax us to get this accomplished? Well, in Bernie Sanders, people don't get this. I mean, Bernie Sanders ran for president and the debt for the Democrats in 2016 and 2020, but he's always been an independent in the Senate. You know, Bernie's a lifetime socialist. In 1980 and 1984, 1980 when Americans are choosing between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Bernie Sanders

party, which he was a formal presidential elector to, was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the SWP. I don't thinkist Workers Party, the SWP. I don't think Bernie ever actually joined the SWP, we've tried to figure that out, but he spoke for them and was a formal presidential elector for this, he was a supporter. So he's very much a socialist. By the way, if I could give you a quote here.

I don't know if this is totally off subject, but Mussolini, all right? Okay. We'll do it. if this is totally off subject, but but Mussolini. All right. OK, and and and Mussolini, who's referred to as a right wing fascist. I just want to before you read the quote real quickly, those who are watching right now. Thanks for being here. We've almost got 300000 subscribers right now. We don't. When we hit that, I will finally be happy. So if you could click that, that would help that that's right.

And also, if you are a local, that would help that, uh, that subscribe button. Also, if you are a local supporter, go ask a question for Dr. Kengel, cause we're going to get to some questions soon. So, uh, the only way to ask your questions is either to sue send them a super chat or to go over to locals and, uh, and post your question there. Sorry. Yeah. It's leaning.

Well, yeah. Yeah. Uh, Mussolini and Hitler are both often called far right, but they were both socialists and, and in fact, in fact, Hitler, the party Nazi meant national socialist German workers party. All right. That doesn't sound like, you know, Ronald Reagan or Ludwig von Nises or Milton Friedman.

All right. National socialist German workers party. And by the way, did he oppose the communist? Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, but you, you get you get socialists and communists you get the the Bolsheviks Come out of a 1903 meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and they split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks So, yeah, the Bolsheviks call themselves a majority and they call the Mensheviks the minority

But they came out of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. So you will get, you get these people in a room together, they'll go at each other's throats over little tiny different issues that they disagree with. But Mussolini, who's also considered by, you know, people historically in the left and everything as a right winger, he was a Marxist and he referred to Marx as quote, the father and teacher and the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence. So he was a Marxist and look at this quote that will really confuse everybody. Mussolini,

Fascism is for liberty. It is for the only kind of liberty that is serious, the liberty of the state. Because for the fascist, all is comprised in the state, and nothing spiritual or human exists. Nothing human exists. Much less has any value outside the state. So this is how they can just destroy these works. Fascism is for liberty, right? Fascism is a state.

Is that 1984? It's for the liberty of the state, exactly. Freedom is something- That's exactly right. So they use the state and the power of the state for their Marxist or socialistic means. And so I would warn the people at the Democratic Socialists of America, right? You may say that you're against Authoritarianism and I commend you for that but but the more that you want your state to do

In order for this group of oppressed right to be assuaged from from these attackers from these capitalists You're gonna have to give power to the state and in order to take down a few pegs, these owning class, this owning class, you're going to have to take away some of their property, which probably means their capital, which probably means taxing their income, which means taking redistributing by the fiat of the state to do that. And so that's why I ask, what do you mean by that? I want to see it put to paper how you're going to do that. Don't just give me this gobbledygook. Yeah, because one thing that struck me as a layman reading the Communist

Manifesto was, OK, so you've got the proletariat who are much more numerous than the bourgeoisie. We are going to take the private property of the bourgeoisie and somehow inherit it for a time. But if there's a lot more of the proletariat of the bourgeoisie and somehow inherit it for a time. But if there's a lot more of the proletariat than the bourgeoisie, you're not all fitting into their private property. So who's kind of agreeing to live in the nice places

while the others choose not to? Right, and- The point is, the practical application isn't there. And especially today- Tearing down something, yeah, that's attractive. Let's blow this thing up, yeah. In fact- And then how do you build it?

So using these definitions, I would say in America today There's more bourgeoisie than proletariat, especially if you're defining bourgeoisie as like the owning class that these people are doing Yeah, I I mean far more people in America are owners and private property owners. Yeah, Neil is my proletariat Yeah, right. He's your he's your your wage slave unless he hires somebody but but but Neil owns stuff Damn, right and it's in a suit.. Damn right. And as soon as he, and as soon as he becomes a homeowner, is he a bad guy? Is he part of the owning class? Yeah, they would be, I suppose.

Certainly if he was to rent anything. Right. And so, so in America today, the bourgeoisie so defined in these crazy categories might be a lot bigger than the proletariat. There's not that many people even that are that are working in the steel. I drove across the bridge coming, the Allegheny coming here today, right? Those old steel mills are shut down now. A lot of them are working at home on their computers and their laptops and homes that they own. Here's the final, here's the final line from the DSA. Um, we want a democracy powered by everyday people. Again, that's gotta be me. I'm definitely, that sounds great. Yeah.

The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control. Yeah. Well, do they know that Lennin was a big supporter of democracy? And Ingalls was a big supporter of democracy. In fact, let me give you Lenin's definition. Lenin said, democracy means equality. He said, democracy means equality. Okay, that Bella Dodd who was a member of Communist Party USA said Oh, yeah, democracy. They always talk about that meaning communists

She said when the communists talk of democracy when the socialists talk of democracy, they mean economic Democracy see we hear that and we think, oh yeah, founding fathers, man. Jefferson, freedom of speech, freedom of press, bill of rights, right? But Lenin said, yeah, I support democracy. Democracy means equality. Democracy is of enormous importance to the working class in its struggle against the capitalists for its emancipation. But democracy is only one of the stages on

the road from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to communism. And Ingalls said this, democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat, get this, if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property. So they wanted to use democracy in order to go against private property. That's how they saw it. And he even talked about America, Ingalls did. In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make common cause with the party, which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie

And use it in the interest of the proletariat So democracy and even like our Constitution are tools to be exploited so American communists would sit there before the House Committee and un-American activities and And they'd be asked are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? And what would they do? They'd cite the Constitution. They'd invoke the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination,

which made anti-Communists furious because they knew these guys were literally sworn to the Soviet Union. And if they ever took over the United States, the first thing they were gonna put through the shredder was the US Constitution. So they used these things as a temporary means in order to do what they want to do with their larger project.

Do us a favor, quickly define the difference or define communism, socialism and Marxism. And then if it's okay, I want to go through the 10 outcomes of communism as outlined in the manifesto and just give and have you offer a brief reply to each 10 points. But yeah, these distinctions between communism, socialism and Marxism. Yeah, I'm glad I brought my computer with me so I can give you this stuff verbatim. I usually just do it off the top of my head. No, it's helpful.

Thank you. So the book, the definition on this comes from Lenin, a book he did in 1917 called The State and Revolution. And he issued it in September, 1917, never finished it completely. It's a long tome, but running the violent state got in the way of finishing the book. But he gives a definition there, okay?

And here it is. This is right from the horse's mouth. This is Lenin. And this brings us to the question of the scientific distinction between socialism and communism. Alright, everybody's like, okay, good, here it is. Here it is from Lenin. What is usually called socialism was termed by Marx the first or lower phase of communist society. And so far of the means of production becomes common property, the word communism is also applicable here,

providing that we do not forget that this is not complete communism. So Marx and Lenin are both saying that socialism is the first or lower phase of communist society. So the dialectic of history, you'd go from slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism. So, socialism is the final transitionary step to communism.

Marian Smith of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation used to say, as the Christian aspires to heaven, the socialist aspires to communism, which is a good definition because it's like a religion to them. Now here's where it gets a little messy. Today's socialists will say, well, I don't want communism. I'm a democratic socialist. And then they'll kind of redefine it. But in terms of Marxist-Leninist theory, socialism leads to communism.

If you type in Google communism, Merriam-Webster will say common ownership of the means of production. At least it said that forever, until about a year or two. Now they're playing with it, man. I mean, the different definitions. But we're now in a society where people are redefining marriage, they're redefining their gender. I mean, there's over, Google has over 70 different definitions of gender.

So leave it to these folks today to come up with their own new definitions of socialism. It's just kind of a train wreck in trying to define anything today. But according to Marxist Leninist theory, socialism is the final transitionary step to communism. All right. Let's go through these ten outcomes of communism as laid down in the manifesto. And if you're able, let's try to give a brief... It's the ten point plan, the ten goals. The ten goals. So let's, if you can try to give a brief response to each, otherwise this would take far too long. But the first goal of communism is outlined is the abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purpose.

Yeah, yeah. There you go. But it starts off the first of the ten points, right? Abolition of property in land. Yeah, application of all rents of land to the public, it kind of speaks for itself. Wow. Yeah, it's like double down, tripling down, quadrupling down on abolition of property. What might that look like if that happened right now? I don't own my house anymore, you don't own your house anymore.

Yeah. So presumably no one can take your house from you except the state. Yeah. So the state really, it's not like we all own everything. That's right. Imagine doing that. And it's not that no one owns anything, it's that the state really, it's not like we all own everything. That's right. Imagine doing that. And it's not that no one owns anything.

It's that the state owns everything. Right. That's what Lenin said. It doesn't actually mean that the people commonly own the stuff. I mean, Lenin's like, you've got to be stupid to think that. But if you tried to do that today, that is, it's impossible. Which is why my point is, I'm sorry, I know this sounds insulting and demeaning, but I don't know how anybody today could be a communist. You've got to

look at this and say this is not possible. To be fair, I think a lot of communists today would say that of that first point, wouldn't you say? Like, AOC's not calling for the abolition of private property. I would hope so, but I read them and I watched them online, and they will argue for this and that and kind of, it's just a non-starter. Yeah. All right, well, let's scratch that one. You can maybe try this in 1848, but in America today, forget it, which again is why a lot

of modern communists are doing gender Marxism, new victim class, critical race theory. I mean, today, it's just pure sophistry. All right, let's get rid of that one. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Not an afterwards start. Two is one of my all time favorites. But like two, I can see why socialists today would push for this. A heavy progressive and graduated income tax.

All right, so just look, it would be nice if people were all living in a way where they all had opportunity, they all had houses and cars and, you know, it seems unfair that certain people should have yachts and private jets and other people have to eke out a living working at Kroger and renting. That's unfair. So if we had something like this, then we could distribute the wealth. Well, we do now. That's what's fascinating about this. I remember the first time that

I learned that, I was reading an old Reagan speech, and he said, you know, our progressive graduated income tax right out of the Communist Manifesto. And I said, I just said hyperbole by Reagan, right? Because I had never actually read the Communist Manifesto, even though I majored in political science and went to graduate school and all this other stuff. For those at home, what does it mean? People who go to law school and don't read the Constitution, which happens all the time. It's totally true. I believe you. Maybe it's self-explanatory, but for those at home, progressive or graduated income tax, what does that mean? We got in

America, and progressives today speak like this as etched on the Liberty Bell in 1776, we got our progressive graduated income tax in America in 1913. It required amending the Constitution with the 16th Amendment to make it possible. So we now have a permanent federal tax on income and it's graduated or progressive, which means if you make like, let's say,

zero to $20,000 a year, you'd pay 0% income tax. 20 to 40, 10%, 40 to 60, 15%. It gets higher and higher and higher. I think the top rate is 36% or 39.6. When Ronald Reagan was an actor in California, the top rate was 94%. 94%. I know, look it up. People won't believe it. The FDR actually wanted during World War II, and this is in Burt Fulsom's book, Burt and Anita Fulsom's book, FDR Goes to War, FDR actually wanted a 99% federal income tax

on income over $100,000. People can look it up, this is on video, people are gonna check it. He wanted 99% on income over $100,000. So once you get over that next, you're over $100,000. Yeah, $99,000 goes to the federal government just for the income tax. That's aside from any state income tax, sales tax, property taxes, inheritance tax, all that stuff. So if Marx knew this about America, he would have been happy with this.

Yeah, he probably would have. And by the way, that top rate was moved down to 70% by JFK. And then Reagan took it eventually down to 28%. When Reagan was finished in 1989, when Reagan came in, there were 16 tax brackets. So you'd be taxed at that level, that level, that level, all the way, 16 of them. When Reagan left, there were two rates, 28% and 15.

And some people in America pushed for just a flat tax of like 20%, 15%. But since Reagan left, it's now gone up again, and I think it's like 36 or 39. And just to clarify too, it's, cause I have them all pulled up now, basically looking at this, it seems like what has happened is

not that there is one top wealth bracket, that's like, this is arguably, it's basically the top wealth bracket has basically been cut off. So not necessarily that these people that used to be paying 70% have now only have to pay 39%. It's that that bracket has been cut off. So they're now clumped in with the group behind them.

And you can argue about that a little bit with inflation and stuff, but like, yeah, the top bracket that's the 70% is for $200,000 and that's in 1974, $200,000. And today's money is like over a million dollars Yeah, there's no bracket like that today the highest bracket today And for people who say $600,000 for people who say well the poor pay more taxes than the rich. No, just look at that chart

If you're if you're under like 25,, you're in the bottom tax bracket. You might pay like 10%, right? As compared to the wealthier people pay like 36, 39%. So you do pay higher at a higher level. What would you like to see happen if you could? I'd like to see a flat tax. And then again, the people who think emotionally about this stuff well that wouldn't be fair then the poor would

pay the same percentage as the rich yeah they pay the same percentage it's 20% but if you make two million a year okay you pay a lot more than if you make two thousand a year yeah no no do math'm going to push back a little bit here. Use the calculator. I'll say it's a... This is Neil's last show before he goes to... So this is where he comes out as a full on commie. Right. Well, I will say this is a little bit less.

I am, I do kind of, to me, it seems strange that there is no higher tax bracket above 600,000. It just stops. That is strange, isn't it? Okay. But I will, I will say this. This is, I've written down a few things that are like the actual concrete things that I think of people thinking when they say they're communists or socialists or whatever. This is one of them, is they say, well, there does seem to be a way which people can exploit workers, right?

You can have a system where you exploit workers, you can put in a Walmart and put all the small businesses out of business and then raise the prices. And you're in control, there's money going to corporations rather than local people. This is about like distributism, that kind of thing. So it seems to me that the argument isn't that rich people should pay more money because they're rich and we want them to pay more money.

The idea is that the way to get that rich seems to be about using the work of people and this is kind of a counterbalance of that. Yeah, yeah, and you can, I think these are all legitimate conversations and debates, right, in a functioning free market society about what would be the best tax brackets and so forth. I think I detest the property tax because you could have some little old lady who lives in, you know, we're in this area going closer to Pittsburgh, like Fox Chapel up in St. Clair, who's now 80 years old, doesn't work and who lives on social security and maybe whatever money she inherited and her husband's dead and she might have to pay

$30,000 a year in property taxes $2,500 a month just in property taxes and I what I don't like about too is it assumes that The county or the state owns the property Who's she paying it to they don't own that that property. She bought it. Her husband bought it. So I would say, I hate to come up with another form of tax. Do a higher sales tax if you want to. But I don't like that one. The other one I detest, and it's point three, right, is the inheritance tax.

Before we get to that, it sounds like you're saying that you can have legitimate questions about the way things are. But the one solution that won't work is communism. So come up with something else. And that could be a spectrum of different opinions and options. But it's not the state taking private property. And one of the worst ideas in history is abolition of private property. That's madness.

You're going to have 100 million dead on your hands if you do that. And have, right? That's exactly right. I would just say, it seems like what I see a lot is things like bigger tax brackets and stuff like that, people do call that kind of thing communism. And they say, that's communism. Communism is bad because it's about the abolition of property. But it seems like there does need to be a distinction.

The Marxist communism that's in the manifesto, I think is criticizing that is different from criticizing today's ideas. Yeah. 100%. I agree with that. And by the way, to have complete redistribution of wealth and common ownership of the means of production and abolition of private property, what kind of tax rates are you going to need to have complete leveling of all this stuff? I mean, you think that through. Are we attacking a straw man here by even looking to Marx as if he is the expositor of the communist doctrine? I mean, there's been a lot of development in Darwinian theory.

If we were to sit here today and try to critique it and just critique what Darwin wrote, that seems like that would be to critique a straw man. Are we falling into that here? Well, and there's Marxism, Leninism, there's Maoism, there's these different variations or strains. We have to pick something. But here we are in 2022, and in July 2019, America Magazine, which is the American Catholic Jesuit Magazine, published an article called The Catholic Case for Communism. What did you think of it? I was floored

I was on vacation in New Jersey and I got an email from Tom the producer of drew Mary Annie show and relevant radio and Said I know you're on vacation, but you could you come on and talk a little calls from him I couldn't believe it. Yeah, and and that would have been That would have under the 1949 people decree against communism, under Pius XII, they would have been literally excommunicated for that. And I think they did a follow-up piece, why we wrote an article defending communism. Yeah, in fact, there was an editor, a note from the editor, Father Malone, I think, on why we published a piece called The Catholic Case.

And people asked- You know you got blowback, you gotta do that. Yeah, and the picture that goes with it is Evo Morales, the tin horn crackpot of Bolivia, handing a communist crucifix to Pope Francis, and Francis is smiling. It's a communist crucifix? And by the way, Francis said in December 2013, the Marxist ideology is wrong. So he has rejected it. But he, I collect this stuff. He hasn't said a word more and he's not a Marxist, but he's definitely not strong on it.

He's not strongly. At least not strong. Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay, I don't want to put you on the spot. Yeah, no good. I don't care. put you on the spot. Yeah, no good. I don't care. If there's someone who claims himself or thinks of themselves as a Catholic communist watching right now, and they're like, by darn it, I'm going to come on

and I'll debate this guy. Yeah. Well, the church has said you can't be a Catholic. I thought, would you be, would you be open to a debate if someone? You know, I'm not afraid to debate anybody, but that would be like saying to me, I'm not afraid to debate anybody, but that would be like saying to me If if you if you have a like an American Nazi on you want to debate with them. No, I'm not doing it so I I just I any it's just it is so beyond the pale of Reason that it's just sophistry and it's just but what if're, what if they're a democratic socialist? Oh, sure.

Okay. Would you debate? I could probably do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, you'd have to, you have to consider who this person is, right? Coming from where they were debating. So yeah, but someone who's a, um, a Catholic communist, it's just, you think that's on

par with saying I'm a Catholic Nazi. I'd have to, would you, I could be nice. I'd have a hard time being charitable. I wouldn't want to sound insulting either You can sound insulting. Yeah Well, the nice thing about debates is you get equal time to be insulting The other thing about debates is people people really do want more light than heat people like heat in the moment Yeah, they're really trying to understand these issues. So now I asked that sort of debate somebody where you're just like

Everything you believe is wrong I mean like I like I I could, I'm a registered Republican and I could easily debate a Democrat and we'd find all kinds of things to agree on. But a Catholic communist, it's an oxymoron. And the church has said, you can't even be a Catholic socialist. I mean, the church calls your communism a satanic scourge, demonic, from the pit of hell. Do you actually think to say to be a Catholic communist is like saying a Catholic Nazi? Or would you not go that far?

I don't, I'd have to think all that through. Yeah, fair enough. And I know that those who would hold to socialism today don't hold to everything Marx said. Yeah, no, let me say, so someone doesn't clip that and get in trouble. Yeah, you can't be a Catholic and a Nazi either. Right. No, of course. But are you saying that the two are on par? Like they're as contradictory? No, I mean, no, they're not on par. Nazis and communists are very different. It's one of the reasons they went after each other. Ronald Reagan used to say between a fascist

and communist, there's not like a dime's worth of difference between them because they're both about the power of the state. But are they both as oxymoronic? Well, they are very different. So, you know, a Nazi, a Nazism, fascism and they're definitely all different, but they do all involve the power of the state. Yeah. You know, and the intrusive power of the state and authoritarian control of the

state. I was shocked. They're both really bad. Speaking of Nazism, I was shocked to see what Marx had to say about Jews. Correct me if I've got this quote wrong, but something to the effect of once the Jews are emancipated from the world, the world will finally be emancipated from the Jews or something to that effect. It's horrible.

It's horrible. And the stuff he said about blacks. Yeah. I mean they not great Yeah marks and Ingalls you if you're reading through letters between them in German. Mm-hmm. You come across the word Nigg, yep, they they don't they don't use the German word for black or Negro. Yeah, they use the American English racial Epithet, yeah Marx uses the N-word throughout his writings. He referred to one person, Ferdinand Lassalle,

as the Jewish N-word. And he referred to his own son-in-law, Paul the Farg, who was partly Cuban. So picture this, Marx and Engels, these two evolutionary atheists sitting around chortling as they try to figure out how much quote-unquote n-word blood Paul has. Paul's married to, it's his son-in-law, and they're like, I think they're talking about his cranial formation, talking about hybrid

descended from the Negro race and from Egypt, 1 eighth n-word blood, 1 12th n-word blood. Ingalls wrote a letter to Paul's wife saying that, oh, I see he's running for office in this district in Paris that contains a zoo. Well, he'd be a perfect place for that. Given that, as a zookeeper, given that he is, as an n-word, one step closer to the animal kingdom and apes than the rest of us They were evolutionary atheists Marx and Engels believed that black people were lower on the evolutionary scale than white people And Mark's called Paul who was partly Cuban Negrillo or the gorilla the gorilla that's what he called his own son-in-law

Paul committed suicide in a suicide pact with Marx's daughter. Marx had two daughters who committed suicide in suicide pacts with their husbands. That's a messed up father. Well, he might be a messed up father for the things that he said, but obviously they're a good father, so his children commit suicide as well. Yeah, oh yeah, yep, yep. But you think that it was his influence that perhaps led to it. Yeah, well, yeah, he was, he was, well, there's, there are, to be fair,

there are some Marxist scholars that think that Marx was actually a doting father. So, but two of his daughters committed suicide and suicide packs with their husbands. Fair enough, I mean, I can see somebody kind of leveling the charge of ad hominem at you. Like, who cares? Yeah, sure, he was a horrible person, congratulations.

But I think what you were saying is actually important if we're going to be erecting statues of the man and then refusing to tear them down right if they're gonna if they're gonna cancel you know George Washington or whoever for they said I mean you could cancel Marx man just for the use of the of the n-word alone and by the way I need to say this is a key point but the private life of Marx is very much his writings and what he believed publicly and about the state are totally an extension of his private life in so many ways. So in his case, the private life does offer lessons for the kind of society that he wanted. So it's relevant in his case. So there's no duplicity in him. It's just that what's in him is shit

Let's keep going Abolition of all rights of inheritance. Yeah, so communism takes over and then No one's inheriting anything. That's unbelievable and for people that Any millennial who considers himself or herself a Marxist or likes communism Abolition of all right of inheritance you want what it by the way, what does that mean? That means The money you would get from your parents one would assume that this is what that means Would be taken by the state. Yeah Confiscated confiscated by state because you because we've

abolished your right of inheritance. So all that money that your parents saved, all right, that you know you're a trust fund or whoever, whatever you do, now you have to be a rich kid. Just whatever Americans, most people's parents own homes. When the parents die, you're gonna inherit some of their money. Why should the state get all of that money? They talk about greed. That's greed. That's government greed. They come in, they're already taking your property and graduated progressive income tax. And then whenever you have left the inheritance that you want to leave to your

kid, they're going to take all of that and imagine a system in which you had no right of inheritance where all of that money went to Uncle Sam or the federal state. What's this thing going to do with all that money? Build pyramids? Why do they even need that much money? To build giant concrete brutalist architecture. What are they even going to do with all of that? And of course the grandest hypocrisy of all is that Marx and Ingalls, the guys writing

this book, got all of their money from inheritance. And these guys want to abolish it. No, they want to abolish it for you, not for them. I heard Ben Shapiro once say, for those who want the state to be more involved in your lives, have you been to the DMV? Do you enjoy going to the post office? Well, another lesson here too is that all of these Marxist dictators that end up taking power, they're the greediest people in the world.

They never give up power. Look at the Kims in North Korea. They live like kings while the entire rest of the country is broke. Look at the Kims in North Korea. They live like kings While the entire rest of the country is broke. Look at Fidel Castro when he died. Castro was worth two billion dollars He was one of the top ten wealthiest Rulers in the world according to Forbes magazine every single year you want equal equal distribution of wealth Go to a place like Cuba in North Korea 90% of the people are equally poor. And then there's the 10% of party apparatchiks

who own all the property, have all the money. And at the very top of the pyramid there, there's Fidel and Raul, right? And it's like that with Stalin, it's like that with Mao, it's like that with all of these communist dictators. So the big dirty secret here is really, this is communism for you, not for them. It's for the ruled, not the rulers.

Number four, confiscation of the property. Before we move on from that, there's a big, what would I say, like meme kind of going around right now based around an article that was like focusing on the idea of nepotism babies. So it's like people who are parent or kids of rich or famous parents and how they essentially putting forward a bunch of celebrities and saying well these people actually had rich or and or famous parents and I guess the idea is that you would lose some respect for them or that some of them would be talented and the other ones kind of just are positioned in that place unjustly because they have had this advantage. How do you think that connects to this conversation? Well I would I would add

there that their parents made that money and they've earned it legally and their children have a right to be useless. Right, right. Yeah. And it should be useless with or without money. Yeah. And it's unfortunate that the parents shouldn't do that, but should the state then come in and play the role of- There's the, there's keeps coming back to this.

Like moral level. Moral solution. That's the thing that keeps coming back to it. So we would need some sort of a morality bureau to come in in Washington and decide which of these cases are just and which are unjust. And then how much of that money presumably

would need to be taken from these kids. And then given to who, right? So what's the solution to that? That's the question you gotta keep coming back to. It's very easy to point out awful things in the world. Right. But if your solution is abolish private property and have the government take care of everything.

Yeah. I mean, they're brats and that sucks, but what do you do? Uh, and again, people with no money can be awful too, it turns out. Yeah. And by the way, I don't envy them. I don't wake up in the middle of the night and they, I can't believe they're, I can't go back to sleep. Right. Where's my manifesto?

Make that a pacifier. Oh, I see. Centralization of credit in the hands. Oh, hang on. Confiscation of property of all. And OK, let's try to do the next really quick. Yes, this is going to take us eight more hours if we don't know the five.

OK, centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of national bank with state capital and the exclusive monopoly and Exclusive right? What does that mean a national bank with state capital and exclusive? Credit do you know it do and do do the young people that are out there? They're looking for loans for their car or their house or whatever, want a banking system like that? Of course you don't. Try getting a license plate renewed. You need to do that for them.

Yeah, why do you want that? No one wants that. All right. So this is a really a pretty good book if you just read it. No, it's not read it. You not know what you're talking about. Number six, centralization of the means of communication

and transport in the hands of the state. That's a great one. Greyhound buses. Yeah, right. So that's not run by the state. So centralization of communication and transport. What is that actually? Communication in those days would have been newspapers. So like newspapers and then phone companies would all be owned by the state. Today would be phone companies, newspapers, Google, Twitter, email, radio, TV, everything. You could maybe try to do this in 1848. Today?

And transport, what was transport in 1848? Did they even have railroads yet? The transcontinental was built, what, like 1860-something? So I guess there was some rail at that time. Now there's cars and buses and planes and ship You can't do this today Do you want this today? insane number seven extension of

factories and instruments of production owned by the state the bringing into cultivation of wastelands and the Improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. Yeah, a common plan. What does that mean? Improvement. It's a complicated point. What does help us understand?

I don't even really know how to unpack all of that one. Number eight. Actually, could you, because I'm watching the clock, you got to hit number nine because this one is stunning. And people, please listen carefully. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more.

What's that word? Equitable distribution. It doesn't say equitable, does it? It does. Oh, here on the spelling error here, sorry. Equitable distribution of the population of the country. So think about what this means. The gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country? Think about it, right? The gradual abolition of the distinction between in town and country.

What do you mean by that? How are you going to abolish the distinction between a town and a country? Well, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country. They didn't want to just redistribute your property, they wanted to redistribute you. So the beginning of the movie, The Killing Fields, when they're emptying all those people out of the capital of Cambodia and sending them out into the countryside, and people say, well, I'll tell you that's not in my communist manifesto. That's dictatorship. I can't believe they're doing something.

Marx would have never supported anything. Yeah, they are. They're moving everybody more equitably out into the countryside. They're gradually abolishing the distinction between town and country. All the, all the liberals who live in New York and San Francisco. Okay. That's Missouri for you. Yeah. But yeah, exactly. We're going to put you out with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with, with the Trump maga hayseeds out in the Hicks. Okay. You're going to be forcibly,

you're going to live out there because we need a more equitable distribution of the population across the country. If that's not totalitarian or authoritarian, I don't know what is. What's the point of that? And you're going to have to do what the Bolsheviks did. Put them on boxcars and send them off. Or state owned airplanes.

Why would they want that? I don't know, man. I don't know. Well, you should know. I mean, this is your thing. I, I, all right. You want my real, I mean, there's gotta be a reason they made this as well. I think that the, that the answer to the,

this and the fact that it could have ever gotten any supporters and still have people today, I think it's mainly ignorance and people who lack common sense, but there's no logical or rational reason for it. I think it's only a supernatural reason. It does not make logical, rational sense that these ideas could have ever had any appeal and still could and that they could be implemented. And the fact that they were implemented by people that killed over a hundred million people with these ideas, I think says it all. Wouldn't it be part of it?

I agree with my church. I think that this is satanic. Okay, but wouldn't, I mean, I'm trying to get inside the head and figure out why you might want to distribute the population across the country. Wouldn't it be to take advantage of the resources of that country so you're not just in isolated pockets with a minimal amount of resources or at least a limited amount? Wouldn't, if you spread the population throughout the country presumably you could you could become more wealthy I well you don't want to become wealthy yes right no yeah you're destroying Kimmy but they wouldn't but they would say that now I'm with you if the goal is to destroy all traditional. They can't hear you. That's what I'm saying. Yeah

That's good. Okay, you say that again. You read it. Yeah So she said you you can't just dismantle the community or the family you got to dismantle the community It's like Marx everything that exists deserves to perish He's standing in the middle of the burning field, the burning city, right? Everything in flames and saying, now we can begin anew. It's like you've got to take everything down. They call it the most radical rupture in traditional relations. Okay, final one and then we can be done with these ten points and we can all take a drink of whiskey.

Free education, well we've done that. Free education for all children in public schools. Yeah, it actually says that. People are shocked when they see that, but it actually says free education for all children in public schools. So they wanted, and the Bolsheviks immediately did this. They stopped home education, they stopped religious education, they took all schools away from the Russian Orthodox Church, they did this in Cuba. They did this. They did this in all the different countries where communism was taken hold. North Korea, Pyongyang was once called the Jerusalem of the East. It was a very religious city. They take everybody and they put them in public schools,

collective schools, no teaching of God, no teaching of religion, and to do the full indoctrination. And by the way, what does it say at the beginning of the ten points from Marx and Engels? So people are thinking, don't they realize that this would require despotism? Actually, yeah. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be affected except by means of despotic inroads. There's a Marx biographer who says, it is absurd to blame Marx for the gulags and the despotism. What are you talking about? Marx said that you can't even do this unless you have despotic inroads. Marx knew this would require despotism.

I mean, you've got to live in a complete fantasy land to think that you could take away people's private property, inheritance, and all this other stuff without despotism. Of course it requires despotism. Do you think today then, having looked at these 10 things, that the common, I don't know why we keep picking on university students, but the common university student who would say he's a socialist, looks out at an unfair world

and would like to see it more fair? I think that that typical student who, let's say, might say positive things about communism in a poll, doesn't know any of this. Yeah, I think that's probably right. In fact, I spoke at a... But the heavy progressive or gradual income tax is really the only, one of the only things. That they would support.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. In fact, the Democratic Party supports that. I mean, they had the upper rate of 70%. Although the Democrats in August 13th, 1981, and also 1986 supported both of Reagan tax cuts, Joe Biden included. So the Senate Democrats all voted for,

the Democratic House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed Reagan's 1981 tax cut. And Bill Clinton brought up the 39.6. There are people like Bernie and others who would take it up a Lot higher in fact I always say ask somebody like AOC or Ilhan Omar or Jerry Naylor one of these people In your perfect world, what would be the upper income tax rate? I think that's a great question to ask people because it forces them to give a practical answer on a specific point The other thing too is this distinction between like equity and equality. So if we take a hundred people and put them in a village because we're spreading them

throughout the country and we give them all a hundred thousand dollars, we give them all equal resources, the idea that everyone's going to live an equally decent life is insane. Some people are going to be sick, some people are going to be vicious, some people are going to be more industrious. Yeah and if you have an actual free market economy, some people are going to grow that hundred thousand and end up having a lot more than everybody else because everybody's not made the same with the same talents, right, with the same ambition. Ronald Reagan used to say that he believed that the best thing that a free market society could do and that America could do is give everybody the equal opportunity. Everybody has a chance to start at the starting line. Right? No one's prohibited from starting at the starting line. But after that, where you go depends on your own initiative and everything else. And I'm not saying in a callous way, well and as for those who don't do well and are out in the street, yeah fine. Right? Let them, what Scrooge say, let them decrease the

surplus population or whatever. I'm saying help those people. That's where the church comes in and frankly too that's where the state can help. That's a legitimate role for the state. Okay All right. Let's take a break and then we come back. We are going to put you on the hot seat with all of these questions From our local supporters. So if you're watching right now matfrad.locals.com feel free to put in a question Under the questions on communism posts that we put up recently and we'll get back to that soon Hey, if you want to pray better and you're not great at praying right now, you might need the fantastic number one downloaded Catholic app in existence, Halo.

Halo.com slash Matt. Go check them out over there. Click the link in the description below because if you sign up over there, you'll actually get three, you'll get Hello for three months free. You'll have access to their entire app, their sleep stories, their novenas, their daily gospels, their everything. Matt, on an unrelated note, do you, I was trying to find somewhere that I could, you know, hear Jonathan Roomie read the sermon on the night or something. Yes, exactly. Jonathan Roomie, hello.com slash Matt. Yep, yep. Jason Everett can read a night story to you. Bobby

Angel does stuff. Yeah, Father Mike Schmitz. It really is a fantastic app. Here's the thing though, Matt. I don't like I don't want to put all this money into it if I don't know if it's great. Exactly. You're very good at throwing up softballs. So if you download the app right now, I think you can like use a couple of features, but not many. So you can pay for it and it's a reasonable price a month. But if you go to hello.com slash Matt again, click the link in the description below that does two things. Number one, it lets them know that I sent you making them like me more. And I like being liked by them. Second, and more importantly for you, you'll get a three month free trial. So you can try it for what's that 90 days and you can decide whether get a three month free trial. So you can try it for, what's that, 90 days?

And you can decide whether or not you like it. And if you don't, cancel by the end of that three month free trial and you won't pay a cent. But I use it, my wife uses it, it's really great. I think a really great use case for it too. Just something that I was impressed that it had was like morning prayer. I think that's really good,

because it's hard to like read through the book by night, pieces and things. So I think that's really good because it's hard to like read the through the book Yeah pieces and things so I think that's yeah, I'm gonna pray more is to try first Easy next thing I want to talk about is Exodus 90 Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men where you and a bunch of fellas get together in a confraternity as it were In a small group and for 90 days Really live the spiritual life like a champion. I mean, you're praying for an hour every day, you're not eating in between meals, you're not drinking alcohol, you're only taking cold showers.

It's a very grueling 90 days, but it's certainly worth it. They did independent research on people who completed Exodus 90 and what they found is that most people were using their phones and computers far less than when they started They had better marriages. They had better prayer lives. It's really terrific and They're starting soon in January. So now's the time to begin thinking about it So go to Exodus nine zero dot com slash Matt and they've also got a fantastic app and you can learn more about it over there Exodus 90.com slash Matt Finally, I want to let you guys know about parlor and the fact that I'm over there go to parlor Dot-com slash where am I Matt frat if you want the link is in the description below

I'm always posting the latest videos that we put up over here over there And that's a great way to stay in touch with all the work of Pints with Aquinas. It's nonsensorial, you know, they're not gonna shadow ban you or any stuff like that. So parlour.com slash Matt Fradd. Thanks so much. And we're back. Have you done a long interview like this before?

Not this long. And no, and we were just talking to Jenny, one of the people here, and I don't want to put this in, misrepresent her words, but at least got me to thinking this and maybe this is her view as well. But I think most people who think that their communism is good, who haven't really read it, are just ignorant and don't know. But this does have an appeal to certain very selfish and evil people like Lenin and Stalin who can see in this a way to control people and resources and make themselves super powerful. And now

please understand me, I'm just saying for somebody out there who's a Marxist today kind of intellectual, I'm not saying that you're evil, but I'm just saying this has an appeal to certain people like that because they look at this and say, well, if I really want to control things, if I really want to control property, this is for me. One thing I think that's bothering me a little bit in this interview is that I've thrown out the term capitalism and you've sort of said, well, you're not a capitalist and you know people on Wall Street who aren't really capitalists. And so you're unwilling to sort of identify with that title. Fair enough. And that's okay. I mean, you can

define yourself however you want to. And yet whenever we're talking about socialists in any sense, it sounds like we want to like throw the manifesto at them and say, well, this must be what you believe. Yeah, no, I don't want to do that. In fact, like I said, a lot of modern socialists are kind of busily redefining socialism in a way that they feel better defines what they believe. And surely you'd be in favor of that. Well, I don't like messing with definitions to the point where you can no longer define

things. That's a big problem. I would tell that person, in fact, I say this all the time to people, no, what you really support is social democracy, right? More like what they have in maybe Belgium or France. And I will kind of plead with them. I'll say, you're not a democratic socialist. You're more like a social democrat. And they'll say, what's the difference? And I say, well, let me try to explain. So I'm a political science, right? And so these words have meaning. And so

people start going on Google and these faceless twenty-something Millennials who are like redefining words like cultural Marxism as anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, a lot of them don't know what they're talking about. So you can't tinker with definitions and then the definitions no longer have any meaning. You can't soften them up and whitewash them and dress them up and put a pretty pretty pink bow on them and make them into something that they're not. Okay, fair enough. So and but then your problem with the term capitalism is it sounds like that what you're saying is the reason you're unwilling to accept

that title is that it was it was maybe maybe how do they define it? If you type in well if you go to Google right now and type in capitalist definition. I'll do just that. It does look like, well, I don't know who came up with the term, but that's the problem. We don't. I see. Yeah. So, all right, fair enough. Capitalism, an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. Well, see, I really don't know of any country that really fits that. I mean

I don't, yeah what would that even be? I mean if you look at the Heritage Foundation's great index of economic freedom, the freest country in the world is Hong Kong economically. Singapore is second, New Zealand I think is third, Australia's top ten. America is now out of the top 20. So I don't know if that really defines anybody today. Yeah. All right. Look, we don't have much time. And so we've got a lot of questions from our local supporters. So would it be okay if we tried to think of this as the lightning round? Yeah, go for it. Get through as quickly as we can. Jeff says, I listened to most of your book, The Devil and Karl Marx. We'll put a link in the description below if people want to get it. He says, I had to stop listening.

I really enjoy history and know a lot of bad things to do with communism in Russia. I struggled with your book with all the dark things they did to priests and nuns. I'm glad you wrote the book. Did you struggle researching for that book? Well, yeah, Jeff, is that his name? Jeff, if you pick it back up and read the afterword and you could see how I express my agony about having to research this, and it's dark and depressing. It really is, and I can tell you quite literally at the end of the day after writing this stuff, I had to get away from it and read a book about baseball or football, right?

And actually what I usually do at night is I read books, biographies of away from it and read a book about baseball or football. And actually what I usually do at night is I read biographies of saints. I'm reading Padre Pio right now. So I need a break from it because it's so dark. For people who don't know what he's talking about, imagine opening a book with this. This is Karl Marx's poem, The Pale Maiden, 1837. Thus heaven I forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, is chosen for hell.

The Player, 1841. Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab, unerringly within thy soul. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain, Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed. See the sword? The Prince of Darkness sold it to me. For he beats the time and gives the signs. Ever more boldly I play the dance of death." Carl Marx. So, his favorite line was Mephistopheles, everything that exists deserves to perish. And if you read this section of the book on infiltration of churches, and he's probably talking about the prison of Patesti in Romania, oh man, where they took priests, tied them

to crosses, the communists did, laid them on the floor, had prisoners come by, urinate on them, defecate on them, make the priest, consecrate the Eucharist in the form of feces, shove it in mouths. Unbelievable stuff. Richard Wormbrand from Romania saying that while the communists were torturing him, saying something like, one of his torturers said, I've lived all of my life for this moment to express all my evil in my heart against you. And one of them chanting, I am the devil, I am the devil, as he's whipping him. I mean, it's awful, yeah. Called Mary the whore of Christ and Christ the great idiot crucified on and on and on.

Richard Wormbrand, the pastor said, there is nothing, even the worst descriptions of Dante's Inferno cannot compare to the hellaciousness of the way you're treated in communist prison camps. I could truly say that this was of the devil. This is what the Tower of Babel gets you. Doesn't get you to heaven. We can try to build toward a utopia.

Speaking of utopia, have you read St. Thomas More's book on utopia? I have, and it's very different. 1516, and sometimes it's often cited as one of the earlier examples of communism. But in Thomas More's book, religion, for example, is not a bad thing. In fact, priests are part of a highly respected revered class. So in a way, you can't call that in any way a communist. And look at Thomas More. Thomas More was a great son of the church who went to his death defending the Christian faith, the Catholic church.

So in no way is Thomas More's utopia in any way like Karl Marx or the communist Marxist and Leninist vision. Kyle Whittington says, what are your thoughts on distributism? Yeah, Chesterton was a big advocate of it. Belloc? Yeah, Belloc. I could see, I think they were drawn to it given where they were at the times in Britain. The Fabian Society was rising up at that time.

The Fabian Society believed in evolution rather than revolution. By the way, the coat of arms for the Fabian society is a wolf in sheep's clothing. Look it up. Imagine that. H.G. Wells, George Bernard, Shaw, all those guys. So I think they were maybe looking for something in England at the time. The Labour Party's manifesto of 1918 called for common ownership of the means of production. But I think distributism, I don't like it. And I think certainly today, it wouldn't,

I can't imagine it being implemented in America today. H.G. Wells as time traveler seems to be inspired by a hatred of what might be thought of as capitalism. Yeah, yeah. And Wells was, Wells also made some awful comments. He's a very anti Catholic. Yeah. Comments about Lenin and Stalin, which were horrible. Oh, horribly positive. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. George Bernard Shaw. Same thing. Really embarrassing.

I wrote a book on that called dupes. I lay all that out of my book dupes. Okay. Michael V. Elmer says, what are your thoughts on investing in the stock markets of 401ks? There are certain Catholics that say you shouldn't be participating in that. What are your thoughts? I wouldn't say that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a free market system where you can invest your money. I mean, it's a risk like everything else, but you're free to, you're free not to. So it's a free exchange of ideas free commerce freedom freedom freedom private property I mean

how interested should we be in what these things are contributing to financial yeah yeah well that's you know that's a concern too I mean and you consider all those different things when you invest your money can dr. Kang or speak to Marxist obsession with destroying sexual ethics and they influence on the sexual revolution. Oh, yeah I could go on and on about that But that's I mean One of the crowning statements on that was Kate Millett's 1968 book sexual politics, which was her dissertation of Columbia University

She was a Frankfurt School cultural sexual Marxist She was and I've even talked about the Frankfurt School, but that's Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, who was one of the kind of predecessors to the Frankfurt School in Germany, who was a Freudian Marxist. So imagine taking, you got to be really, the worst philosopher of the 19th century Marx and the nuttiest guy of the 20th century Freud and thinking, we should fuse these together into a common field of Freudian Marxism. So Wilhelm Reich wrote the book and coined the term the sexual revolution and if you read

Reich's actual memoirs it is it is stunning. The sexual stuff is unbelievable. He's five years old, you know, fantasizing about, yeah. Doesn't matter. Stimulating the farm animals, fantasizing about jumping in bed with his mother and his mother's lover and on Wilhelm Reich was a sexual freak. Yeah. And that guy wrote the book, the sexual revolution. And see, we don't, people will criticize me, like you said, someone might say,

you're attacking Marx's personal life in order to denigrate his ideas. In so many of these cases, and Reich is a great example, the personal life explains the ideas, and you've got to go into the personal life to really get a feel for where they're coming from. Yeah, that makes sense. Daniel James has a good question.

What's interesting about Daniel is that he was arrested for Antifa activities and then had a conversion to Christ. Wow, wow. He said he started listening to pints with Aquinas and started to learn how to pray the Rosary. Anyway, so Daniel says, Dr. Kengor, with the recent passing of the beloved Queen Elizabeth II,

what are your thoughts on monarchy as a political system? I've heard that some Catholics prefer monarchy as a form of government. I was going to say with the recent passing of Franco Harris to bring us back to the beginning of our conversation on the Immaculate Reception, it'd be a great place to close. Sure, we could do that, I guess. No, I mean, you know, I'm not a monarchist. I mean, I think that the system of the American founders created as originally envisioned, and if you stick to it, is about the best system that's been

created. Winston Churchill famously said, democracy is not perfect, but it's better than all the other systems. I would say that about free market systems as well, too. I'm not saying that free markets are the solution to everything it's not going to bring you to utopia it's not a panacea but it's certainly better than closed economies and closed markets and non democracies. Any super chats or questions in there worth bringing up? We have a ton here but there were some some of them have already been addressed Let me ask this while you're looking for one this comes from t bone or t boon could you please ask dr Canebo pickings? Yeah, speaking of capitalists. Yeah, could you please ask dr

Kangor to shed light on the commonly held belief that the scandinavian countries are so are a socialist paradise We should model ourselves after that's a great question and and do some googling on this we should model ourselves after? That's a great question. And do some Googling on this. There are a bunch of really good articles on how the Scandinavian countries, they're not socialist. In fact, if you look in the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, go to the Scandinavian countries.

Some of them are ranked more free economically than the United States. There's a really good PragerU video as well that one of my students sent me not that long ago from somebody one of the Scandinavian countries. Just because a country might have government managed health care or maybe generous pensions or high regulation, it doesn't make them socialist.

And this is what Bernie and AOC, Bernie Sanders is horrible about this. He'll tell people all the time, well look at the Netherlands, it's a social, it's not a socialist country. Venezuela is a socialist country. That's socialism. Just because again, those countries are more social democracies and the state does some things, it does other things, but some of them have lower tax rates than we do. So it's much more complicated than that Patrick Turner says many people use Jesus feeding the people with the fish and bread as an example of socialism How can this be easily refuted was Jesus a social Jesus was not a socialist for one thing Jesus wasn't against religion

he didn't call it the opiate of the masses and In fact, if you want to start working through the parables of Jesus, right, look at some of them, the tenants, right, the vineyard owner who also pays his people what he wants, depending on whether they came earlier in the day or later in the day. And by the way, defends the ownership rights of the vineyard owner, right? He's allowed to have a vineyard. I mean, Jesus is not against private property. No, you know, Jesus is not Karl Marx. And then somebody responded after, under this person's question, said, socialists can't multiply the fish and bread miraculously.

Right, that's exactly right. That's right. Yeah, Ronald Reagan said socialism works only in heaven where they don't need it and in hell where they already have it. We've addressed this, but Gina asked, why are so many Christians under the impression that communism has any similarities to Christianity? Where are the common errors in that line of thinking and how do we refute them? Yeah, they'll have this incredibly simplistic approach of looking at certain things in Scripture or the New Testament that talk about sharing or sharing wealth and say, hey, Marx does that too. Well, so what? I mean, Hitler loved puppies, Hitler was a vegetarian, right? You don't't take a couple of things here and a couple of things there and say,

so thus this must be a good ideology. No, that's, that's, that is sophistry. It's incredibly simplistic. And by the end of say, extraordinarily intellectually lazy. Yeah. Um, is feminism rooted in Marxism-Communism, asks Heath Farachi. No, I don't think so. No, they, there have been a number of prominent feminist Marxists. In fact, the most famous is Angela Davis, who was a student of Herbert Marcuse, the guru of the 1960s New Left and one of

the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School. And look her up, she is, she wrote the foreword to the Patrice Cullors, the founder of BLM's memoirs. And Patrice Cullors said of herself and Alicia Garza, two of the founders of BLM, she said, we are trained Marxists. We are very steeped in Marxism and Marxist ideologies. But you don't think that feminism in any way has been influenced by communist thought? Well, uh...

Seems to me obviously that it was. Well, I mean, Kate Millett, who wrote Sexual Politics, which was... her sister Mallory, by the way, is a very devout Catholic. Read Mallory's article about Kate Millett at frontpagemagazine.com. But Kate was a sexual Marxist and a feminist. So she was fusing the two. And also Betty Friedan was a communist and feminist as well. But I mean, I just think of the feminist talking points, right? Again, you have like the bourgeoisie, the man in this capitalist system, monogamy, you know, and then you've got the oppressed, the woman who has to have abortion, has to have access to contraception in order to free herself from the shackles

of her. I mean, the commonality is they're both kind of, I think, destructive left-wing ideologies, but, but, but, but if you looked at it, sort of, you know, what are the tenets of, tenets of feminism and line them up against, you know, like a 10 point plan of Marx. Fair enough. I see. Fair enough. You're using words correctly. Right. Right.

I thought this meme- I insist on these categories. I thought this meme was hilarious. It's a red book and it says, well, that didn't work. An abbreviated history of communism. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Except that's almost too cavalier. It didn't not just work. It was very destructive and killed a lot of people, wrecked lot of lives. It's still not a funny name. Yeah, I Lived through communism says ania and my parents were active in underground

It is scary to see how it it cripples back in the US with so many people clapping. Amen I've had I've had parents with so many people clapping. Amen. I've had parents email me and I've done talk shows on the subject of communism where I'll get a call from a distraught mom who's crying and saying, I came to this country after the Berlin Wall fell to escape communism and I sent my daughter

to this prominent elite college and she is a communist. She is a communist. How can this happen in America? Final question. Rootberg says, could you name one place in the Bible that promises that a free market will in general lead to human flourishing and has the magisterium taught that human interactions within a free market economy will somehow tend towards prosperity? Are you identifying the invisible hand with the hand of God? That is, where does this great trust of his come from? What is his theological basis for your

belief in free markets? Well, I would say read Rerum Novarum, read Quadragesimo Anno, Well, I would say read Rerum Novarum, read Quadragesimo Ano, Cetaceumus Anus, those encyclicals, that very much describes my book. I actually very much am in sync with the church on these things. But for example, the Bible defends private property, it says, thou shalt not steal. This book says, and it's a good way to wrap up, that the entire communist theory or program may be summed up in a single sentence, abolition of private property. Theft. Yeah, that's right. That is state fiat to abolish and take away your private property. The Bible doesn't support that. I mean, you know, now the Bible encourages you to do charitable,

good things with your wealth and even share it with with the needy. But you know, but it's no, it's not a manifesto on free markets, but it's um, it certainly ain't this. As we wrap up, how do we, how do we want to wrap up? Is there, is there a single book that you would be almost proud of that you would point people to, to get a fuller understanding of communism and how to refute it? Well, I mentioned communism history by Richard pipes. That's a really good one. You mean in my own book. Well, I mentioned communism, a history by Richard Pipes. That's a really good one.

You mean in my own books. Well, I guess any any good. I like what you said about that book. That's not too long. You don't have to invest your whole life understanding what you would consider to be. And I would consider to be such an idiot. Yeah. And I did a book called The Devil and Karl Marx. So I did a politically incorrect guide to communism.

And I did a book called A Pope and a President on Ronald Reagan and John Paul II and the end of the Cold War, which talks about Fatima and a whole bunch of other things. And I sent to you two, maybe Neil could post them if he hasn't already, but a couple of articles. One I did on marks on Christianity, Judaism, and evolution race. And that kind of sums up some of his really outrageous beliefs on religion Judaism and race And I also did a piece for the American Spectator Called why not cancel Karl Marx and for the record I don't support canceling anyone But when you look at what this guy has said and done

You wonder why people on the left haven't canceled this guy and the reason is because he's one of their guys. He's on the left. But Marx's background is really outrageous. And you have a recent book you just put out? Yeah, The Devil and Bella Dodd. Tell us about that. Which came out through 10 books. So Bella Dodd was a master organizer for the Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s in New York, put a thousand to fifteen hundred teachers in the New York State Teachers Union, and then according to what she told Alice von Hildebrand and others, and we spent a lot of time on this, helped place, quote, over a thousand communist men, unquote, in Catholic seminaries. And we go through that claim,

the documentation for it, is it possible, everything else, very, in Catholic seminaries. And we go through that claim, the documentation for it, is it possible, everything else, very, very, very carefully, and hopefully a very thoughtful one. So the claim that the Catholic Church was infiltrated by the Communists isn't just some cockeyed conspiracy theory. No, that's right. She was part of it. And then she left the party in 1948. The party accused her in a press release of being anti-negro Anti-semitic anti-porto Rican pro-fascist pro-nazi the same thing they always do it's page one of their playbook

Right as they've been doing this for a hundred years And she was eventually brought back into the Catholic faith by Bishop Fulton Shane in a wonderful conversion story So in hers in her case the devil and Karl Marx Marx remained Infatuated with the devil throughout his life and remained an atheist. Sounds like this new book's a little more hopeful. Yeah, in her case, she described breaking away from communism as breaking away from the seduction of the devil and led a life of redemption and reparation and spent the

rest of her life as a courageous witness, warning the world and the church not to embrace communism but to reject it. I would think too, as people watching this, they probably have many loved ones who are interested in socialism or may spout some certain lines like that. A simple kind of Socratic method of questioning could be helpful. Like, what do you mean? Yeah, exactly. Have you read the book?

What was the single thing that Marx or Engel said that you found most compelling? Why? Well, and I would say when they're in classes with a professor who's maybe not giving them enough information, or even if the professor does give information and says something like abolition of private property, just put your hand up and in a non-confrontational way say, what do they mean by that professor? What would that look like? How would this excellent idea be implemented? Yeah, right. How would this be carried out? And without, not in a mean way, right?

Just say, but professor, I don't know, you support this. What would that look like? How much of it would you just start taking the lid off, start asking questions and let it, let it fall apart through its own obvious self-contradictions and inherent fallacies. Well, Dr. Kengo, this has been fantastic. I've learned a lot and it's been great to spend some time with you. Wait till you find out I made it all up.

He's actually a communist. Oh, would you have a correction? He just infiltrated Pines with Aquinas. I wanted to just put straight in this a little bit. The communist cross, the pope actually said this is not okay and shook his head. Yeah, I know and by the way, you said the opposite. Well, well no. What's unfortunate about the picture at American Magazine is Francis' smile. That was your point. Yeah, yeah. Not that he didn't. Yeah and Francis has said the Marxist ideology is wrong. So he has not

been good on communism. He's not a Marxist. He's not pro-communist. He's not very anti-communist. He's been bad on China. He's been bad on Nicaragua. What's funny is there's also a photo of him looking pretty pissed off about it. I know. But not a... yeah that's right. Which one is that? But that's not the one at America, right? How many people? You see the one at America? I haven't seen the smiling one. The one at America. Oh I see. So it was the one time America, right? How many people have you seen in communist crossings? I haven't seen the one of America. Oh, I see. There's this one time that he looked happy.

And I know I think he's I confirm it before we Catholic case for. Apologize if I'm wrong, but I think he's smiling. I'm going to find it. I've got it. I'm opening it. He's smiling. Yep. Right. I know. Shame on them.

And it could be and that could have been a moment where he's smiling like puzzle, like what the, you know, it does look a little goofy when you look at it that someone would think it's okay to make that. Exactly. A communist crucifix, right? By the stripes of marks. We are healed. It looks about as goofy as that. We won't comment on what that is, but yeah. Glory to Jesus Christ. Thank you for being with us that is, but. Yeah. God bless you. Glory to Jesus Christ. Thank you for being with us. Hey, thanks so much. Loved it.

Yeah. Pleasure. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah.