GonzalezEDITED

This podcast episode discusses the concept of Next-Gen Marxism, which is a form of Marxism that has been shaped by European intellectuals and adopted by American radicals. The guest, Mike Gonzalez, explains that Next-Gen Marxism focuses on cultural ideas and popular beliefs as material forces for revolution. He also discusses the influence of key figures like Marx, Goranczi, and Marcuse, and the role of power in the Marxist agenda. The episode highlights the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement and the intentional change in focus towards racial and social issues. This program is brought to you by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. If you would like to learn more about the James Wilson Institute, please visit jameswilsoninstitute.org. We hope you enjoy the program. Hello and welcome to the Anchoring Truths Podcast. I'm your host, Garrett Snedeker. Friends, many Americans believe that the United States is in decline. They see a country that's become unrecognizable, where individuals are reduced to their race, ethnicity, or sexual identity, where children are indoctrinated into radical ideologies, where anti-Semitism has become widespread. This, according to the co-author of a new book and our guest this week on the Anchoring Truths Podcast, is next-gen Marxism. To be short, it's not Soviet Marxism, but it's a form of Marxism that was shaped by European intellectuals, adapted and refined by America's student radicals of the 60s, and diffused throughout the culture as those student radicals became professors, community organizers, and leaders. In Next-Gen Marxism, What It Is and How to Combat It, co-author Mike Gonzalez infuses his story with optimism, but his story also reveals the dark inner workings of the radical left's destructive agenda in the United States, in order to teach us just how to fight back. Mike is the Angelus T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation here in Washington, D.C. He spent close to 20 years as a journalist, 15 of them writing from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He left journalism to join the Bush administration, where he was a speechwriter at the Securities and Exchange Commission under Chairman Trish Cox, before moving on to the State Department. At the Heritage Foundation, he writes on national identity, diversity, multiculturalism, assimilation, and nationalism, as well as foreign policy in general. We hope you enjoy the show. Mike, it's a real pleasure to have you in with us talking about your book Next-Gen Marxism. I wanted to start, though, by asking you, why do you call it Next-Gen Marxism, when Chris Rufo, perhaps one of the more popular commentators on this subject, thinks that the best term to use is cultural Marxism? But give us an account of why you chose Next-Gen Marxism. So Chris Rufo, whom I'm happy to call a friend, and whom I admire greatly, I think he's a key figure. I must say that I purposely did not read his book, because I was in the midst of writing my book when his book came out, and I didn't want his book, his ideas to influence what I was writing. But I'm looking forward to reading it. But I read a lot of what he's done. I'll tell you, independently of what Chris has said, the way I see, and I see three iterations of Marxism. And this is Katie Gorka and I, my co-author Katie Gorka, Katherine Cornell Gorka, we discussed these things a lot before we sat down to write the book. The first one is, it's Marx himself, with angles, but let's just talk about Marx. As the writer of the Manifesto of 1848, of Capital in 1867, and of many other important essays and pieces of work that give us the corpus of Marxism. And that is a very economic view of the world, economically determinist. All of history is boiled down to this epic struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor. And that continues to this day. And that has not been changed. What has changed is that in Marx's eyes, that was going to be the proletariat, the worker, and the bourgeois, the owner of capital. And they were in a struggle, the proletariat was going to win, the proletariat was going to be constantly rising and overthrowing the bourgeois, killing him, killing his family, raping his wife, getting rid of his worldview, and imposing the proletariat's own worldview. Except that doesn't happen. There are no revolutions for the first 70 years, until the Soviet Revolution, the Russian Revolution that created the Soviet Union in 1917, and even that does not go along the lines Marx predicted. And so, Europeans, in Italy and Germany, Marx's ideologues tried to replicate 1917 and fail. They fail miserably. And their big takeaway from that, as they regroup in the Frankfurt School, and then Antonio Goranczi in Italy, the founder of Italy's Communist Party, and they're deep thinkers. It's like, what has happened? Well, the reason why the worker was not rising is because the worker had no interest in revolution. The worker was, the four things that Marx had said needed to be abolished, the family, God, the nation state, and private property. The worker liked all these things, he liked his family, worshipped God, was patriotic, and he liked private property, he just wanted to have more of it. So, Goranczi and the Frankfurt School come up with the idea, the worker has imbibed the wrong cultural ideas from the bourgeois, and he has false consciousness, he has to be convinced culturally to let go of these ideas, and went through struggle sessions, by taking over the institutions, the cultural institutions, and that is cultural Marxism. And that really flowers through the 30s and 40s, comes to the US in the 60s, and really takes off here. Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, is very influential in the New Left of the 1960s, Goranczi is translated for the first time in 1970. What we had, and that is what next-gen Marxism is, is that we make the revolutionary, the members of the so-called marginalized sexual and racial groups. Marcuse, and he's not alone, but where did he write this, he writes it in One Dimensional Man, after he sees the riots, he says, it's going to be the people of other colors and other races that are going to overthrow the system, this is his phrase, verbatim, another phrase verbatim that he uses, the ghetto population. So that is the beginning of next-gen Marxism, to that you add the fact that the new fronts on the war are going to be not just race and sex, but climate, today we see it with Gaza, and you see this baton passing from Marxism to cultural Marxism to next-gen Marxism, one of Marcuse's famous dictums is that the change in the material forces of production will dictate the pace of revolution, Goranczi comes along in the 1920s and 30s and says, but cultural ideas and popular beliefs are also material forces, and that's cultural Marxism, and then Eric Mann, a community organizer who is also a former terrorist who recruits Patrice Couleurs, the founder of Black Lives Matter, he says, ah, but in a racist society like the United States, racialization is also a material force, they all use the same phrase material forces, but you see the baton passing that goes from Marxism to cultural Marxism to next-gen Marxism. How insignificant or how much diminished significance do next-gen Marxists have on material conditions? Because one of the things you might say about how this iteration is different than previous generations is there's almost a making of peace with moneyed interests supporting Marxism, and so you might look at the difference between Occupy Wall Street, which occurred 10-15 years ago, and then you look at the encampments that are occurring now over the October 7th massacres. Yeah, and they're funded by money produced by capitalism, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, Soros, the Open Society Foundation, Tides, Tides is very important in the demonstrations the pro-terrorism, the pro-Hamas demonstrations that we've seen, there are many others, the Ford Foundation is behind a lot of this, this is Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, these were old barons from the Gilded Age who were uber-capitalists, that is a different thing, their foundations have been taken over by non-capitalists, they're run by, their money, their buildings are now administered by sworn anti-capitalists, but at the end of the day, Garrett, this is all about power, power looms large in this story, the word power, I did a word search in Saul Lembski's Rules for Radicals, and I believe, I think it's used like 70 times, I forget, Alicia Garza, another co-founder of Black Lives Matter, the word power is in the title of her most recent book, I forget the title of the book now, but definitely it's about power, so power, what they want is, they want to own the means of production, they may not necessarily want to change the means of production, obviously we know from experience, from looking at the world, that central planning does not work, that you need the capitalist system in order to make the system work, and they hate that, so once they own, let's say they own the means of production, the means of production will cease to produce, which is what has happened in every communist experiment, the wheels grind to a halt and produce shoddy products, but they would own the means of production, this is about their power, ultimately. In your book, you identify a key inflection point as being the BLM riots of 2020, talk about why you think that that reflected a fundamentally intentional change, as opposed to perhaps an unintentional amassing of certain factors, what's your best evidence for the intentionality of this change in focus, and who are some of the key figures who are behind that? So there's several inflection points, a key one is 2013-2014 with the creation of BLM, BLM is created after George Zimmerman is acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, and then in 2014 when Michael Brown is killed by the police, by policemen, purposely in Missouri, you have the BLM architects going there and organizing communists that are coming from all over the United States, and Marxists from overseas, and it becomes a global network. In 2020, the killing of George Floyd offers them a very graphic event that they can then use for various purposes, and they can, you know, BLM, the BLM Global Network Foundation prides itself in sending out 127 million emails in 2020. A lot of them were to organize the protest, there were 660 riots, it is then that they really, they had been convincing the gatekeepers of the cultural institutions of the things they have been saying. A clever fellow by the name of Goldberg, Zach Goldberg, I think his name, did a study for Tablet in 2021, I believe, in which he showed that the language used by BLM begins to get picked up by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and all the other papers, and it's like a hockey stick use of all these white supremacy and all these things. It's just like with Marx, Marxism was not used a lot until the 1917 revolution, there's not a lot of mentions of Marxism in the press, all of a sudden it kicks up after 1917, you see the same thing in 2014. But in 2020, they really do a lot of, nearly all, the leaders of the cultural gatekeepers of our cultural institutions, be them museums or libraries or universities, but not just cultural, sports leagues, everything else begins to buy into the idea, or at least pays lip service to the idea that we're systemically racist, that we have, that we're structurally oppressive as a society, which is reasonable if you have lived overseas or even visited another country, you know that we're the one of the most benign, open, freest societies on earth, even under Biden. So that is when you can have this mass acceptance of this. And when you have very rapid change, Robin DiAngelo, anti-racism trainer, who's actually a huckster, begins to have training sessions with corporations. She has a training Zoom session with most members of the Democratic Caucus and the House of Representatives. Abram X. Kendi's book begins to be assigned everywhere. And you have the huge rise in anti-racism trainings, which are nothing but the struggle sessions, the exemption struggle sessions, and the malice struggle sessions of which we spoke earlier. So that is what we have, except that in our analysis, Katie's and mine, we believe that they overshoot the mark. The American people catch on to this. They become awake to the woke and say, wait a second, we want no part of this. We actually like our country. We like our society. We like our civilization. This is cultural genocide, and we do not want any part of this. So you identify, we were talking about this just before we were recording, you identify as the activist Rudy Dushka called it, a long march through the institutions, really blossoming during 2020, almost like it had been clear and apparent to those who had been paying close attention. However, one couldn't ignore it any further to, to put it mildly, after the BLM riots, that institutions that had thought to be neutral were now offering the kind of out and out support for what many people would have thought were issues that had nothing to do with their core concerns. I mean, during the BLM riots, we had entire corporations pledging millions of dollars in the case, I believe it's the Claremont Institute, found that close to $100 billion had been pledged. Now, it's far from clear how much of that was actually transferred, but we had, you know, astronomical sums of money being, you know, pledged. And all of this now could no longer be ignored. But what was that long march like before we started to see it blossoming in 2020? And what almost made it inevitable that 2020, something like 2020 would have happened? Yeah, I mean, that's what I say is that two viruses escaped the laboratory in 2020. One is COVID-19 in Wuhan. And the other one is critical race theory in Harvard. The critical race theory emerges out of critical legal studies in 1989 is when the first seminar was held, the first conference at an incumbent of all things outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And they take over the faculty lounges. In fact, the 60s radicals have been taking over other faculties. Felicity Barringer, the former Moscow Bureau Chief of the New York Times, the New York Times of all things, writes this very interesting story in 1989, penned by Barringer, in which she says, this is really super interesting. Communism is being defeated in the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc, and yet it's blossoming here in the United States where Marx is becoming, you know, run of the mill. But she notices that it's not in the economic departments, it's in the humanities and law faculties. But for like a decade from the late 80s to the first 2000s, people are actually writing that critical race theory and all these ideas are contained within the walls of the faculty lounges. They haven't really jumped the fence yet. So the argument that Katie and I make is that they, but they begin to form the cultural matrix. For example, you read the thesis, I think, at UC Santa Barbara, but one of the UC schools, the thesis written by Malina Abdullah, another key founder of Black Lives Matter in 2003, she quotes, and I have read her thesis, she quotes everybody in critical race theory. She quotes, you know, Bell, Derrick Bell, she quotes Kimberlé Crenshaw, she quotes Sheryl Harris, she quotes Richard Delgado, she quotes Angel Davis, who's not a critical race theorist, but she's a communist. Real all-star lineup there. Yeah. So what that tells you is that this has gotten into the brains of people like Malina Abdullah, who, don't forget, plays a foundational role. She's there from the very beginning in 2013. She's now recognized in the trio of founders, people usually refer to Alicia Garza, Patrice Couleurs, and Opal Tameri. The fourth one, and the most important today, as we speak, you and I, Garrett, in May 2024, the most important of the four is now Malina Abdullah. Her thesis is filled with this mumbo-jumbo. It's filled with the language of critical race theory. So that then has a full flowering in 2013 and 2014 when they finally, you have praxis, they put these ideas into... Yeah, that's a term that I've heard mentioned a lot, but for the benefit of our listeners, what is praxis and why is it helpful to understand how these actors operate and how they make the distinction between theory and praxis? Yeah, I think it's a classical Greek term. I think it's mentioned by Aristotle, and that is you have theory and then you have praxis. Praxis is the application of theory to everyday life, to practice. That's all it is. And this is something that every Marxist has mentioned. I forget where Marx wrote this. He says, the purpose of a philosopher is not to just think big thoughts, but to change the world. And every communist, every Marxist since then, Derrick Bell says the same thing, believe in praxis. Well, praxis happens, begins to happen in 2014. There's manifestations of it before, but in a large scale. And then critical race theory begins to be implemented, for example, by Richard Cardozo, the superintendent of the New York public school system, the largest public school system in the world, the largest school system in the world, appointed by Mayor de Blasio. And he begins to make principles and teachers go through critical race theory trainings. So this now, this really, that's in 2017, I believe, I begin to write about it then. It really jumps the wall then. And as I said, it explodes in 2020 with the video, the graphic, Death of George Floyd. Now, anybody who reads your book will understand, after doing so, that you do not understand this as a wholly American ideology or wholly American phenomenon. Walk the reader through numerous examples of how so much of next-gen Marxism is a blending of what has, quote unquote, worked in other countries and then adapted for praxis within the United States. You bring up Venezuela, actually, quite, quite notably in the book. What made America so prone to being taken by this ideology, but also what were, in your opinion, some of those notable examples of sort of morphing or adaptation of its application in other countries? So America is the least prone to all this. Americans are the most pro-liberty people on Earth. And it is that way because of our founding, founded on natural law and natural rights. And both these things, natural law and natural rights, are mentioned in the founding documents throughout and in the founding institutions of America. But America is the prize. America is the prize that every Marxist, you know, American exceptionalism, apparently, I don't believe this is the case, but apparently is something that, I believe his name was Lovejoy, the American, the head of the American, it's going to come to me in a minute, the head of the American Communist Party. He writes a letter to Stalin saying America is exceptional. And Stalin shoots back saying I'm not going to put up with American exceptionalism. He wants to communize the United States. And the Soviets, in fact, have all these hand-fisted attempts at communizing us. America, because we're the land of the free and we truly are, they get us, they get everything. If we communize, if we become communist, then the rest of the world has no, there's not going to be any redoubt. There's not going to be a place to hide. So they target us. Two examples, very quickly, of this confluence that you're talking about. One is, for example, one of the, I think it's Samidun, one of the groups that's training, that has been trained, working from memory here, has been training a student pro-terrorism protest on campuses today, is the Alliance for Global Justice. The Alliance for Global Justice was created by a group of people who were in Nicaragua, in Managua, in the late 80s, and suddenly said to them, said to these Americans, look, if you really want to help us, leave, leave Managua and go back to Washington and set up a base. And they came here and they set up what became later the Alliance for Global Justice, which is a money funder for hard-left groups. Another prime example of this comes when Chavez, in 2006, gives a speech in Caracas, in which he tells the World Social Forum, look, if this is all well and good, and I'm glad that you're here and everything, but we need to set up a base in what he calls the belly of the beast, the United States. And lo and behold, within 12 months, there's the creation of the U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007. And, Garrett, do you know who's there? No. Well, people who we have already mentioned in this story. Oh, boy. Eric Mann, Patrice Couleurs, Alicia Garza, and a bunch of other people. And they begin to set up the infrastructure of what we have today. Wow. Well, you do, for the benefit of our listeners, you do point to some signs of hope in your book, Mike. What are those signs of hope for perhaps turning the tide? And what are the ones that may not even be quite so apparent to our listeners? Hopefully, some of them are points of light that they've already recognized. Let me give you the quick ones. Just two days before our interview, a day before our interview yesterday, Martha Pollack, president of Cornell, resigned her position. She did it on her own. Two months before that, Claudine Gay was fired by the board. I don't know where she puts it that she was fired. As president of Harvard, Liz McGill was fired as president of the University of Pennsylvania. And just a week and a half ago, MIT announced that it would no longer compel professors to sign a DEI pledge. So these are signs that at least the side of truth is scoring some victories. The biggest sign is what I see when I travel the country. The reason you see me so tired today is because I just arrived from Charleston this morning. I got up at three. I spoke to a very large... Liz, are you tired? I don't want to see you with some coffee in your system. There's plenty of coffee in my system. Trust me. I spoke to about 100 people last night in Charleston. I'm going to be in New York next week. Two weeks ago, I was in California and Texas. I travel the country and I encounter Americans who have had it up to their back teeth with all of this. They have really had it. So the regime change attempted in 2020 was so extensive and so successful that it overshot the mark. And it had the virtue of waking up the American people to the woke. And this simply can be said by what I call the October 8th effect, which is people seeing after the October 7th massacre, the October 7th attack by Hamas on civilians in Israel. And from October 7th on, they see American kids supporting Hamas, supporting the bad guys and deriding the suffering of their victims, including women who were gang raped by the terrorists in Israel, the Hamas terrorists in Israel, and the terrorists also from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who also said they were there. So that, to a lot of people, including many liberals, has opened their eyes to how wrong it is to teach the Marxian notion that all of life must be seen through the prism of the oppressed and the oppressor. And among these people are liberals. You know, Barry Weiss is not a conservative. I don't know if she can be called a liberal anymore. Bill Maher is a liberal. His eyes are open to this. He said what I just said. He said if there's anything, and I'm paraphrasing, about three weeks ago, four weeks ago, he said if there's any silver lining to this whole distasteful thing is that people are waking up to the idea that seeing everything through the prism of the oppressor paradigm is not a good idea. Bill Aikman, the donor, the major donor, who pulled this money from the University of Pennsylvania, he's also not a conservative. He's a liberal. I probably disagree with him on abortion and tax rates and all that. But he agrees with this. So a lot of people are having, the scales are falling from their eyes. You know, Milton Friedman thought that it was important to change the climate of opinion. If you change the climate of opinion towards the better, even the bad politicians will do the right thing. But if the climate of opinion is bad, even the good politicians will do the wrong thing. I think the climate of opinion is shifting and shifting hard on these things. But now we must have political victories. And after political victories, the leaders who get elected have to use their power, have to use their power to help the American people. The American people need help in terms of legislation, of laws, for example, telling schools and universities and places of work, factories and offices, that they cannot compel speech that violates the First Amendment. Things like that. So this is the sequence of events. But I'm very optimistic. Obviously, we're nowhere near, there's no time to take any victory lap. It's all hands on deck. But I'm very optimistic about where we're going. Often on this podcast, we've had occasion to praise the work of the DeSantis administration in Florida as being at the vanguard of some of these efforts to push back on the worst excesses of critical race theory, DEI, through prudential uses of state power, particularly in the education context. Why does this seem to have united the right and split the left so neatly? Because I think we get it. Well, I'm not saying, there's a lot of people, a lot of Republicans who talk a big deal and will not defund universities. They will not defund the Latino Museum or the Smithsonian. They will not ask hard questions of the Smithsonian. And they may not defund universities. These are Republicans. So not all of the right is united. I think if you talk about the voters, they're united. Their elected leaders are not there yet. They need to see that the climate of opinion has shifted, and shifted hard. And then they will suffer consequences. I'm talking about the political leaders. They'll face negative consequences if they don't do the right thing regarding the cultural issues. But the people have shifted. But the left is very divided over this. What do you see as some of the fault lines? You know, the funders for these demonstrations that we're seeing. Now, these demonstrations don't need a great deal of funding. But the funding for the groups organizing the demonstrations, they're all Biden funders. They're all Democratic Party funders. And they're changing the president. The president has abandoned Israel in its hour of need by withdrawing the shipment of armament that Israel needs as it fights Hamas. There are many people in the Democratic Party that still support Israel, that are Zionists. We will see how that shakes out. But there is a breach between the squad, AOC, and Ilhan Omar, and Bernie Sanders, and Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman on one side, and people like Joe Manchin on the other, or a senator from Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema. We're still watching it, so I don't know how it's going to shake out. I think the hard-woke ultra-left is ascendant today. It looks like they might win that argument. To the detriment of the Democratic Party, and to the detriment of the country. I was going to ask, not that we spent too much time on this podcast talking about Democratic politics, but do you have any sense for why John Fetterman's out-and-out support of Israel seems to be underappreciated by folks on the left who would rather there not be a debate on this? He's tough for them. He's tough for them because one of the things they say to champions, this is all a front, but they say to champions they're disabled, and he has fought off a disability. He was disabled clearly right after the stroke, and he's coming along very nicely, and he is making a lot of sense. He is a Democrat, a Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, a junior senator, who's making a lot of sense across a number of issues, not just that one. Some people have speculated, I'm not a doctor, that he's learning everything anew, and that when you learn everything anew, then if you're rational, you're going to come out with these views that he now espouses. He's pro-Israel. I don't think he has any time for wokeness. So it's very difficult for them to do him in, but they will do him in. And do you think that if the Democratic Party won't self-police on this issue, that the strong surge of youth interest in transforming the Democratic Party will indeed lead to a confrontation at the Democratic National Convention this summer? I don't know. But what I would contend is that it is self-policing. It's policing on the left. The policing is being done by the ultra-left, and they're making sure that the center-left falls in line. And is the center-left going to fall in line in time for this summer? That's perhaps the million-dollar question. I don't see how they can buck. I don't think how they can say, we're losing Hispanic voters in great numbers. I don't like using the term Hispanic, but Spanish surname voters, we're losing them in great numbers. We may lose a big chunk of African Americans, especially African American males. I don't think this argument is going to hold any sway. I think the left of the left, the ultra-left, the woke left, they're Marxists. They're not nice people. They want power, and when they see power within their grasp, they'll stop at nothing. So Joe Manchin, he's not a Democrat anymore in many ways. He's thinking of running as an independent. Kyrsten Sinema became an independent. That's a sign, Garrett, of who's winning. Well, I think that what your book has done is it's given us the necessary background, but it's also given us the necessary language and framework to discuss this transformation that's underlying so many changes in American politics. But it's also, I think, just an incredibly useful book to help kind of give a vocabulary and give a lens through which to view, in particular, some of the things that were just right in front of our own eyes, and we were trying to make sense of them. And so to our listeners, please, please do pick up a copy of Mike's book. Mike, though, where can our listeners follow your work? Where can our listeners keep up with your latest? So first of all, my co-author, Katherine Cornell Gorka, and I are very much obliged by what you just said. The title of the book is Next-Gen Marxism, What It Is, and How to Combat It. You can get it on Amazon. Katie likes to say, well, get it at a small bookstore in your neighborhood. I said, nah, go on Amazon right now and get it. It's drive sales. And leave a review. It's selling very well. Leave a review as well. You can find my own personal work. I have a weekly column in the Washington Examiner. It usually appears on Thursdays or Fridays. My Twitter or ex-handle is Gundis Alves. That's Gonzales in Latin. And that's spelled G-U-N-D-I-S-A-L-V-U-S. Just look Mike Gonzales on Twitter at Gundis Alves. I'm also active, though less so, on Facebook and not active at all in Snapchat and all the other... Rightfully so. It's probably best for everyone's health to stay off of TikTok. Oh, I've never. No, and I've told my children not to get on TikTok. Although, that's probably the best place to see unvarnished Next-Gen Marxism, just to watch what gets said to you. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it's not a coincidence that it's owned by the Chinese Communist Party. That's right. Well, Mike, just a real pleasure having you on our Anchoring Truths podcast. And we wish you well as you barnstorm the country to talk about your book. Thank you very much, Garrett. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. This program has been brought to you by the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights and the American Founding. If you'd like to learn more about the James Wilson Institute, please visit jameswilsoninstitute.org. Thanks for listening. This program has been brought to you by the American Founding.