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[Pre-order a copy of David Horowitz’s next book, America Betrayed, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on May 7th.]
If more Americans had been familiar a couple of decades ago with the history recounted in the pages of Next Gen Marxism – a cogent, comprehensive new book by Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Katharine Gorka, an expert on the terrorist threat (and Sebastian Gorka’s better half) – a lot would be different. For one thing, Barack Obama would almost certainly never have been elected president. Fewer people would’ve been suckered into the George Floyd hysteria. Parents would’ve been warned a lot sooner about the existential danger of sending their kids off to study in the Ivy League. And that’s just for starters.
For the history told in Next Gen Marxism is the history of what we now know as wokeness – the leftist sociocultural ascendancy manifested in (among much else) cancel culture, the Antifa and BLM riots, DEI, “judicial reform,” “squatter’s rights,” the near-ubiquitous promotion of transgender ideology, and (not least) the conspiracy of Hollywood, the media, the D.C. swamp, and Big Tech to destroy Donald Trump’s first term and deny him a second.
It can feel as if the woke madness slithered out of nowhere, like some poisonous snake, just a few years ago, only to be coiling itself tightly around our throats very soon afterward. But in fact, this toxic creature has a long lineage that leads back to Rousseau and the French Revolution in the 18th century, Marx and Engels in the 19th, and the Russian Revolution in the 20th. Then there’s Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose revolutionary writings – notably his theory of hegemony – have made him, in the authors’ words, “the unrivaled Marxist political theorist of the past half century.” (And guess who, of all people, is America’s “top Gramsci scholar”? None other than Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph. It’s one of a number of surprises here – surprises that, perhaps, shouldn’t be quite so surprising.)
Another key player in this story is Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), father of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s. To be sure, by the time Marcuse bowed out, revolutionary leftist thought had undergone a sea change. For Marx, the revolution was all about class – about encouraging oppressed workers to overthrow their oppressors. But would-be Robespierres in America learned soon enough that in their country, that dog didn’t hunt. American workers didn’t want to revolt; far from being downtrodden Russian peasants desperate to throw off the yoke of serfdom, they were free, ambitious citizens of a constitutional Republic who knew that their hopes for economic betterment lay in capitalism, not communism. So American radicals changed their tune. Dropping class struggle, they shifted focus to categories like race and sex; and since workers were too streetwise to fall for their claptrap, they sought recruits among the restless children of the privileged class – naive, wayward souls who lacked only one precious thing: a reason to feel that they weren’t oppressors but oppressed.
The New Left ultimately crashed and burned. But the will to tear down America endured. Revolutionaries went underground, only to re-emerge as members – even pillars – of the establishment: college professors, politicians, journalists. In what came to be known as the “Long March through the Institutions,” they proceeded to proselytize broad swathes of the young and dumb. And who best “personifies the metamorphosis from 1960s radicalism to armed revolution to terrorism to chief Long Marcher through the Institutions”? Answer: Bill Ayers (b. 1944), who in 1969 founded the Weather Underground, a gang of terrorists who idolized Charles Manson, had “Cuban and Viet Cong advisers,” and held mass orgies, their ultimate goal being – what else? – America’s “violent overthrow…through all-out revolution.”
Ayers’s role in the Long March proved to be a significant one. Living in Chicago, his terrorist past apparently either forgiven or forgotten by all and sundry, he involved himself at the highest level in civic affairs, taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago – and mentored a young community organizer named Barack Obama. Now, I suspect that millions of Americans had never heard the term “community organizer” until we all became acquainted with Obama’s résumé (or, rather, his fanciful version thereof) during his first presidential run. How many Americans, if they’d understood what the term really meant, would have voted to put him in the White House? For community organizing, as outlined in Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky (1909-72) – who, incidentally, was the subject of Hillary Clinton’s college thesis (see how it all fits together?) – is not some benign form of public service but, rather, a coldblooded, calculating means of acquiring power.
Part of the task of the community organizer, advised Alinsky, is to “develop multiple issues.” It’s David Horowitz who has observed, on more than one occasion, that “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” Gonzalez and Gorka put it this way: “race, sex, sexual orientation, climate, social justice, gender, and animal rights” – among other issues – are all “fronts in a larger war.” Which is why, if you attend a climate summit, there’ll be sessions on gender issues and women’s rights; and if you go to a Women’s Studies Conference, you’ll find panels on race and queer identity. Gonzalez and Gorka note that when Communism fell in Europe, Americans who’d been active in explicitly pro-Soviet groups “started to move to climate work.” If you’re looking to topple the system, any old cause will do.
So it went on for years: behind the scenes, in the corridors of establishment institutions, radical leftists made their moves, and consolidated their power. Then, in 2013, halfway through Obama’s presidency, BLM was founded, inaugurating NextGen Marxism’s “revolutionary stage.” Donald Trump’s surprise win in 2016 — thanks to an electorate that was increasingly tuned in to the left’s skullduggery – threw a monkey wrench into the radicals’ plans, necessitating a DEFCON 1 response: the Russia collusion hoax, the 2020 election steal, the “insurrection” lie, the “threat to our democracy” mantra, the two impeachments, and the multitude of baseless lawsuits.
The year 2020 was pivotal. George Floyd, an obscure Minneapolis thug, was crucified and rose again from the dead. BLM staged hundreds of riots in his name, citing his death as proof of “systematic racism” and “the urgent need of systematic change” – charges that were embraced with unsettling alacrity by churches, corporations, the media, even the military. It was all lies – lies in the service of the revolution. And when Joe Biden moved into the Oval Office, the revolutionaries went with him: according to Gonzalez and Gorka, his administration actually began “cowriting federal policy with the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.” Sound incredible? Why? It makes total sense. It would explain a lot. And it was precisely what the Next Gen Marxists had been working toward for decades.
Needless to say, Gonzalez and Gorka’s book isn’t the first to map, in whole or in part, the route from Rousseau to Robespierre to the Red Army Faction to Rob Reiner. Twenty years after Roger Kimball’s landmark study The Long March (2000), a British writer named Marc Sidwell wrote another volume, also entitled The Long March. Both my book The Victims’ Revolution (2012) and James Lindsay’s The Marxification of Education (2022) examined the radicalization of the academy. And just last year, Christopher Rufo published America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Which is not to suggest that Next Gen Marxism is superfluous. Far from it: this story needs to be told and retold until everybody gets it. Like each of its predecessors, Next Gen Marxism has its own emphases and its own strengths. One of those strengths is its fluid, elegant prose. Another is its final chapter, “What to Do,” which catalogs at length some of the many things that readers can do to help take back America. “We chose not to be a nation ruled by a monarch or an all-powerful leader but to be a nation of self-governing citizens,” write Gonzalez and Gorka in their closing pages. “That takes work.” And their last sentence sums it all up admirably: “We have a country to save.” Indeed we do.
You forgot to mention socialism’s roots in Judaism and Christianity.
“The roots of America’s welfare state lie in the Populist-Progressive Era of the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially with the Protestant social gospel movement, which held that Christian ethics and “social justice” should drive public policy, including wealth redistribution, trust-busting, graduated tax rates to punish the rich, cradle-to-grave handouts, and missionary-style imperialistic ventures abroad to spread the faith and make the world “safe for democracy.” The concept of social justice, which jettisoned the idea that we actually earn and deserve what we get in life, was first adopted by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, as drawn from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.” Richard M. Salsman, “Holy Scripture and the Welfare State”
Sounds like you’re mixing up things… you can’t speak about Protestantism and reference the satanic catholic fake church…
The satanic catholic fake church is not a representation of Christianity… it was built upon lies and they worship the fake god allah of satanic islam…
AMEN! You speak the TRUTH!
“The satanic catholic fake church ”
Without the Catholic Church, the West would never have flourished.
You don’t know what you owe to the Catholic Church, you are ungrateful.
You are misinformed, and the proof is in your own words.
The “social gospel movement” is not Christian. It uses Christianese, but it is a perversion of the gospel just as surely has the term “social justice” is not justice.
“Wealth redistribution” is NOT a Christian value. It is a Marxist value. Where does the Scripture mandate the taking of wealth from the wealthy to be distributed to the poor?
The bible warns of persons who might claim Christ, but are not His own. ANY religion or practice, whether Christian or even Objectivist, can be perverted by false followers who twist words and obfuscate.
Your common mistake, THX, is ascribing to Christianity that which is not advanced in the scriptures. You use the lives and reasonings of those who claim Christian orthodoxy, but whose praxis betrays that orthodoxy.
The arguments of a false Christian do not magically accord with the Scriptures. In fact, they twist the scriptures.
Objectivism is squarely in the camp of the French Revolution and Enlightenment. You have said so yourself. Own it.
If you tell me that no one can know what words mean because there are different interpretations, then you and I and even your Ayn Rand also cannot be understood The existence of differing interpretations of any body of words does not mean the text is incapable of understanding.
“Objectivism is squarely in the camp of the French Revolution and Enlightenment. You have said so yourself. Own it.”
I never said any such thing, you do love to put words in my mouth.
What I said is that there were different Enlightenments during the Age of Enlightenment with differing and even oppositional philosophical roots and outcomes. There was the English, Scottish, French, German, and American Enlightenments.
The American Enlightenment had its roots in the philosophy of Aristotle as channeled through the philosophy of John Locke. The “philosophes” of the French Revolution were charlatans like Rousseau who claimed to speak for reason and reality but were actually speaking of irrational ideas not based on reality. Just like Judaism and Christianity are not based on the facts of reality and reason but on faith and a supernatural, magical, fantasy.
The central moral code of Christianity is altruism and self-sacrifice for God, neighbor, stranger, and enemy. This Christian moral code of altruism and self-sacrifice leads to the brutality of theocracy not individual liberty. When Christianity ruled the West it resulted in the Christian Dark Ages and Middle Ages, when Christians practiced the renunciation of the worldly pursuit of happiness in order to seek Salvation for Original Sin and maybe gain the grace and forgiveness of God in a magical afterlife.
Objectivism is clear cut, there is no way to misinterpret it, it is not written in mysterious parables. The only way to misinterpret Objectivism is through willful evasion. or simple stupidity.
“The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason.” – Ayn Rand
“The central moral code of Christianity is altruism and self-sacrifice for God, neighbor, stranger, and enemy.”
You have it kind of inverted. The central theme of Christianity is more like God’s altruism and self-sacrifice towards humanity.
Christianity’s moral code are things like love and fidelity to God, seeking his Kingdom, glorifying his name, striving towards his perfect righteousness, etc. It’s by way of a Christian’s imitation of God’s perfect and gracious nature that results in the altruistic imperative.
If I have misunderstood you, THX, then I apologize. I certainly do not love to misrepresent you. I recall you have praised the enlightenment and also the French Revolution as triumphs of human reason.
Christianity is also clear cut, and so your misrepresentations of it is all are the more egregious. The highest moral law is to love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself. The entire moral law hangs upon those two commandments.
But the moral law is impossible to keep. The law brings death because no one is righteous. God does not wink at our imperfections and sin. The blood of all the bulls and goats could never atone for the sins we continually commit against unimaginable Holiness and Perfection.
So God Himself provided the perfect sacrifice, giving us His Son to live a perfect life under the Law and die as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. We Christians claim an alien righteousness (belonging to Christ) when we place our trust, our faith in the Person Christ. We are saved by this faith. The genuiness of our faith will result in a changed life, and our works will be done in and through God’s Spirit Who both gives us the will and the power to obey Him.
Not perfectly, THX. Not until we pinch ourselves and it doesn’t hurt.
The central truth of Christianity is the Gospel. Not altruism. The Gospel. You and I are sinners and therefore we sin because it is our nature to do so. God saw our helpless estate and sent His only Son to fulfill the requirements of the perfect moral law on our behalf – something no one has EVER done. And then Jesus took upon Himself all of the sin of the world and received the punishment we all deserve. His resurrection from the grave is proof of the absolutely sufficiency of Christ’s atoning death – the death of spotless, absolute, infinite, sinless Perfection. A price no one could pay.
THX : “You forgot to mention socialism’s roots in Judaism and Christianity.”
You’ve been repeating the same bullshit for years. You’re just making propaganda for your sect here.
You use Frontpage to spread propaganda.
I hope you give them money.
Welfare dependency is not endorsed by the New Testament – Paul says (2 Thess 3:10 NKJV) “For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.”
What in Judaism proper – i.e. not latter-day American Reform Judaism, which has become a feeble-minded pantheistic Christianized “tikkun olam” Sunday-school sanctimony – can you produce as a root for socialism/social justice? One might argue that the intellectual roots of socialism and its progressive and woke branches lie in Christian antinomianism – precisely where it broke with Judaism.
Marxism is a pseudo-secularization of Judeo-Christianity. Marxism is religion masquerading as rational science.
“You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must because this is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every account, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Religion versus America”
blablablabla…
The same blablablabla that you have been posting here for years, of your sectarian ideology which all humanity outside of your little sect doesn’t give a shit
Thanks Bruce.
Can the “right” become community organisers?
By right I don’t mean the political right wing, I mean ordinary decent families.
Our community organisers are mothers and fathers, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters.
We must tell our stories about how our families are the centre of our success and this starts with the “Honour your mother and father” commandment.
A commandment is a command that one must obey regardless of context.
A commandment is not a moral principle. What men need to live, prosper, and achieve happiness is not commandments but rational moral principles that they can apply contextually.
The religious mentality is a mentality trained to blindly obey commandments from an authority that is blindly worshipped. Such an individual not having been educated to think for himself but indoctrinated not to think for himself but to obey an authority outside of himself is ripe for any Fuhrer, Imam, Pope, Reverend, Priest, Commissar, or Jim Jones who he can obey.
“If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a “moral commandment” is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments….
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” – Ayn Rand
Still as indoctrinated by your sect I see.
THX: “A commandment is a command that one must obey regardless of context. A commandment is not a moral principle.”
A commandment is always motivated by a moral principle. Context reveals whether the moral principle is good or not.
Very well stated, Mo. The original community organizers built civilization by maintaining the nuclear family. Every other aspect sprung from there.. Obama’s type of “organizers” are devoted to tearing it down. Is the purpose to advance Marxism. I don’t think so. Like Alfred said in the Batman movie: ‘some men just want to see the world burn.’. I don’t think it’s much more complicated than that.
The Luciferian Globalists are working towards establishing satan’s religion… islam…
Communism is dead… islamofascism is what’s coming…
WOKE, DEI, Alphabet creeps all share the same hatred against the God of he Bible. His clear condemnation of that lot forces their childish rejection of the possibility of salvation. Lust for the next sexual oddity is the other similarity shared by the same ilk.
Emile Durkheim’s study of suicide and his coined term ‘anomie’ gives academic credence to the above.
Great article.
Wishful thinking: If only the story could be “retold” to the masses who don’t read books but watch “The View.”
“Blessed are the Peacemakers?” The real enemy within and how it all started.
The Peace movement was directed by the Communist Party USA and the Soviet KGB’s World Peace Council, “Use Peace as a Weapon of War.” Their logo was a dove in a clinched fist. The CPUSA aided and abetted the enemy, yes, TREASON! They started the spitting on our soldiers and called them baby killers. (They’re now getting their Cult of followers to spit on police, “Defund the Police!” The story is long.)
Michael Myerson, a member of the Communist Youth League/CPUSA, went to VIETNAM IN 1963, and they made him the Honorary Nephew to Ho Chi Minh. When the war started, who do you think Myerson and the CPUSA sided with? They sided with the KGB which funded the CPUSA and their numerous fronts, about 1600.
In 1979, during Carter, whose Carter Center was taken over by Communists, real Communists, the Soviet’s invaded Afghanistan. The Shah of Iran fell, still dealing with the Mullahs, the state sponsors of terrorism. (“Imagine a world without the Mullahs!”) THEN, COMMUNIST SANDINISTA Daniel Ortega was installed in Nicaragua, still ruling, and who arrests ALL POLITICAL OPPONENTS “AS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!” SOUND FAMILIAR? Democrats protected him and funded him as Communism spread throughout Central and South America. MYERSON OFFICIALLY STARTED THE UNITED STATES PEACE COUNCIL, RUN BY THE COMMUNIST PARTY! They recruited MILLIONS in the sixties, MILLIONS in the eighties and when Communism fell, our Communists were the only real hardcore Communists left.
THOSE CPUSA/KGB RECRUITS are today’s teachers, professors, Hollywood, Big Tech, MSM, city/state/national leaders, FILLED CONGRESS and the White House with BARACK OBAMA a KGB recruit starting in 1983 while at Columbia. (Remember in one of his books, he admitted to “seeking out Communist professors.” He was also in several CPUSA/KGB FRONT GROUPS with the most radical Communist students.) He then surrounded himself with the same recruits which he appointed to takeover departments which were then used in a Coup-attempt against a Sitting President and now the former President.
THEIR JOB TODAY is to recruit the NEXT GENERATION OF COMMUNISTS we see in the streets which are led by ANSWER, The Party for Socialism and Liberation, The Revolutionary Communist Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Communist Party USA. Their signs prove it.
Good summary but one thing I would point out is that it is incomplete when it says, “Dropping class struggle, they shifted focus to categories like race and sex; and since workers were too streetwise to fall for their claptrap, they sought recruits among the restless children of the privileged class – naive, wayward souls who lacked only one precious thing: a reason to feel that they weren’t oppressors but oppressed.”. Marcuse also sought recruits among what he referred to as ” the ghetto populations.” And, as it happened, ever since what we’ve seen is the Left using white radical students and radical blacks (think, in its most recent iteration, Antifa and BLM) as its bludgeon to smash capitalism and “the main enemy” the U.S.. It is no coincidence that perhaps Marcuse’s most famous pupil was Angela Davis. Marcuse may have been evil but he was no dummy.
I am afraid we are too late to save America. The damage done through decades (and really well over a century) is way too much and the left, which controls the bureaucracy, education, media, and entertainment complexes will not sit idly by and watch us undo what they worked hard to accomplish.
Let’s be realistic, U.S.A. as a free constitutional republic as it was intended, is done for. This union MUST dissolve and reform along ideological lines. Unfortunately, by the time people realize that, there will be a lot more pain that we cannot even fathom at this point (other than very few of us).
And how would you convince people to dissolve the Union? If not through war, or the threat of it, what then? And what would you replace it with?
A Christian government based on God’s laws like…how we were successful for over 100+ years from 1636 to the 1787 Free Masonic secular BS take-over…
Depraved psychopathic murderous berserk Islam must also be considered here.
The fact that the Islamic world, its society, culture, and ruling class and religious leaders have not been able to, or willing to put an end to their own depravity, lunacy, psychopathology, and violent murderous behavior toward Israel and Jews, is proof positive that they have no intention to ever correct this sickness and insanity that, after 1400 years is still displayed in the Koran and sharia law and all contemporary Islamic writing and discourse and teaching..
If the Islamic ruling class ever comes to the conclusion that they can actually destroy Israel and Jews with “acceptable” losses for themselves, they will in fact attempt to do it.
That being the case, then it is absolutely necessary that the Islamic world be de-Islamified, just as the Germans were de-nazified and the Japanese were de-militarized after their defeat in WW2.
I cannot envisage that the Islamic world will, or even can, accomplish this task from within.
The fundamental mindset of the Islamic world, culture, society, law and religion is one of depravity and psychopathology and hate at its root.
That so much of the world’s fossil fuel energy resources are in the hands of a truly mentally depraved Islamic worldview and culture and society is a serious danger and threat to all of civilization.
Until it is stopped, Islam will continue to be a curse and a scourge on all of humanity, not the Jews alone.
As Islam has been for 1400 years and counting.
I highly recommend reading Prarie Fire: The politics of revolutionary anti-imperialism (1974) and the role of the PF Organizing Committe. Its the blue print for intersectional politics and other aspects of “wokeness.” Wiki has a good summary. Leftist ideology denies freedom to think and feel as an individual. Its a reactionary, primitive assignment from a sick/athiest power-hungry Higher Authority of what U must believe based on your color, language, religion, geography, sexual preferences, etc. I think the Torah is a good antidote.
CRIMSLAM. CRIMinal iSLAM.
WHO is funding the ’60s nihilist Marxist subversive criminals?
The 11M Satanist theosophist, pedo-Illuminati secret crime society.
BAN these Satanic saboteurs from holding any power position in society–or we will all die.
OBEY GOD John 3:16 and our country will not be a hell entrance hole. Go find a Deliverance minister and watch him cast out supernatural evil demons from a victim if you fantasize good and evil somehow don’t exist.
WE ATTACK!
John 3:16
Semper Airborne!
James Bond is REAL