Fighting next-gen Marxism

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Up next: Marxist ideology in the American government.

On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt outlined President Trump’s executive actions in week one.

LEAVITT: President Trump also signed sweeping executive orders to end the weaponization of government and restore common sense to the federal bureaucracy. He directed all federal agencies to terminate illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to help return America to a merit-based society.

Those orders included ending DEI programs in the military as well as the federal government.

REICHARD: Joining us to talk more about the ideology behind these programs and how it affects American life is Mike Gonzalez. He was a journalist for 20 years. Now he’s senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation, and co-author with Katharine Gorka of a new book titled NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.

So Mike, let's just start with this question. What do you mean by next gen Marxism?

MIKE GONZALEZ: I mean the evolution of Marxism from mainly an economic based doctrine to one that emphasizes cultural issues. That tries to take over cultural institutions, change the way people think, and then introduce its doctrine that way. DEI is exactly that. DEI was a way. One of the things DEI did, it did many things, was to try to brainwash Americans, whether in young Americans, in their schools or in their colleges and universities, or also in their offices and factory floors, brainwash them, get rid of the old hegemony, the old way of thinking, and introduce a new hegemony, a new way of thinking.

REICHARD: You know, a very basic question is, why is analyzing the world through that oppressed versus oppressor lens a bad thing?

GONZALEZ: It's wrong, because on many levels, the world does not work that way. You know, there are people who are oppressors, who then become oppressed, and vice versa. You change roles. You're not a permanent oppressor. It also gets rid of forgiveness and forgetting. It's in direct opposition to what we heard in Galatians, “You're no longer a Greek, nor Jew Gentile, but if you believe in the word, you are children of Abraham. It's to see the world as just an epic struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. Is a violation of Christ's message and of Christ's commands, I believe.

REICHARD: Interesting. President Trump signed executive orders that go further back than the past four or five years alone. So he's not just undoing Biden administration actions. How so?

GONZALEZ: He also rescinded Executive Order Number 11246, which was signed by Lyndon Johnson in September of 1965. And the reason why that is important is because it was the first government action that required federal contractors to in effect, agree to have racial quotas. It demanded the federal contractors give the government their racial makeup. In time—since ‘65—this executive order has been used as the order that requires quotas. And obviously, if you're going to have meritocracy, you cannot have quotas. And by the way, the Supreme Court has said that quotas are illegal with the decision that in many ways allowed affirmative action in universities. So you know going back to that and rescinding, revoking 11246 was a key step that without getting rid of that EO by Johnson any reforms would never work.

REICHARD: Another executive order Trump signed instructs the federal government to investigate DEI at institutions of higher education that have substantial endowments over a billion dollars. How is that going to be very important do you think?

GONZALEZ: If Trump succeeds, then the universities are going to be the final place that really pushes DEI. And telling the universities, no, you receive a lot of money, you receive a lot of money, and you're going to have to abide by the law is going to be a key thing. I mean, let's not forget that this takeover of the culture begins with the universities.

REICHARD: What other evidence can you cite of failed Marxist experiments. In our lifetimes?

GONZALEZ: All Marxist experiments have ended up in tears. I mean, even God, in his infinite wisdom, has actually given us laboratory experiments of the same people with the same culture and the same DNA. One side communist, the other side free and capitalist. One completely and utterly fails, and the other one completely and utterly succeeds. I'm talking about the two Koreas and the two Germanys. So absolutely communism, it's not has it ever failed? Has it ever succeeded? And no, it hasn't.

REICHARD: What would you say are the objectives of next gen Marxists? And is it different from the Soviet era Marxism?

GONZALEZ: That was an economic Marxism that believed that man's class depended on his relations to the means of production. That economics had added primacy, that it was deterministic. In fact, cultural Marxism was devised because that kind of Marxism didn't work in the West. All the communist revolutions failed in Western Europe, and they failed any attempt to communize the United States failed. So communist intellectuals came up with cultural Marxism as a way to communize the West, which has much stronger civil institutions, civic society.

REICHARD: Just to clarify, are we using Marxism and communism as meaning the same thing?

GONZALEZ: Yeah, so Marx didn't really distinguish between communism and socialism by the way. In the minds of a lot of people, communism means the imposition of socialism through terror. When I say Marxism and communism, I mean, pretty similar things. The communism with the Soviet Union differs from the Cultural Marxism that is being preached here. But they both have this base, as their key, this belief that all of life, all of history, can be boiled down to this epic struggle between between one group and another group: the oppressed and the oppressor. That is in the first page of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, and that is believed by today's cultural Marxists.

REICHARD: So this ideology isn’t going away.

GONZALEZ: I think President Trump has given us the tools to fight this with these executive orders. It's up to us now, in trying to figure out who's trying to get away with this, they're going to try to relabel DEI. Call this other things. This is happening already. I've seen in the last 48 hours many, many stories about how universities and businesses and even parts of the federal government are trying to relabel DEI, or relabel the people who do DEI under other titles, and we're going to have to fight that. But it's the end of this long nightmare that we have had for the last five years that is now within sight. It's up to us now to take the fight.

REICHARD: We've been talking to Mike Gonzalez, co author of the new book Next Gen Marxism, What It Is and How to Combat It.

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