Dr. Kimberly Cook, a committed Marxist, has written an op-ed piece that ostensibly seeks to explain the high rates of “<a href="https://www.starnewsonline.com/opinion/20190701/opinion-wilmington-needs-truthreconciliation-process-to-address-legacy-of-racism">violence in low-income communities</a>” in our hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. Under normal circumstances, I ignore political screeds written by my Marxist colleagues. However, this recent op-ed is so mired in intellectual incompetence and academic dishonesty as to require a column-length response.
Cook begins her op-ed by saying that “As a criminologist, (she) can offer some insights into this persistent problem (of violence in low-income communities).” By reminding people she is a criminologist she seeks to establish credibility. But she destroys her credibility in the next sentence by adding that “arrest and incarceration exacerbate the problems” she is addressing.
When Cook eschews incarceration, she draws no distinction between petty offences such as drug possession and more serious crimes of violence such as murder, which have been on the upswing in Wilmington’s low-income neighborhoods. Hence, her suggestion that arresting people and incarcerating them would be detrimental raises some serious red flags. Were I the editor of our local Wilmington McTimes, I probably would have passed on Cook’s request to publish her “expert” commentary.
Continuing to speak “as a criminologist,” Cook states that another cause of violence is “a heteronormative masculinity that celebrates dominance, power and control.” This is the kind of socio-babble that offers nothing of relevance in the realm of public policy. No one would seriously suggest we encourage “homo-normative masculinity” or “hetero-normative femininity” as a means of controlling crime.
Cook also laments that the upswing in crime in Wilmington’s low-income neighborhoods is due to the fact that “economic opportunity is not available.” The main obstacle she faces here is, of course, the evidence. While crime has been increasing in these neighborhoods, economic opportunity has also been on the upswing. While the nation is experiencing rapid economic growth, we are also seeing the lowest black unemployment rates in decades. There has been no downward shift in economic opportunity, which would explain the sudden uptick in crime in lower-income Wilmington neighborhoods.
Fortunately, Cook does recognize — at least at some level — how the crimes of her fellow Democrats have affected our community. She states, “Still, our community remains wounded by historical harms of racialized violence (the violence of slavery; the 1898 coup and massacre).” For those not from Wilmington, the 1898 massacre was a political coup perpetrated by white supremacist Democrats against black Republicans. But it has absolutely nothing to do with current rates of violence in poor black communities.
Cook only mentions these historical factors because she simply cannot communicate at length without blaming societal ills on whites and males, unless, of course, the males are gay. The proclivity for identity politics is in her genetic code as a Marxist feminist revolutionary. As preposterous as they may be, her suggestions that slavery (ended in 1865) and the Wilmington race riot (of 1898) are somehow responsible for the high rate of violence in low-income minority communities in 2019 must be explored. So please allow me to speak as a criminologist who is not a disciple of Karl Marx.
Other nations, such as France, kept national crime statistics prior to the American Civil War. But the United States did not do so until the early 1930s. Hence, it is difficult to measure the effects that slavery and local political events of the late-19thcentury had on rates of violent crime. We can, however, use the statistics to pin the blame on other atrocities carried out by the Democrats. (While you consider these statistics, please note that the Democrats launched the War on Poverty in the 1960s).
For the first two full decades for which we have official crime statistics – the ‘40s and the ‘50s – we see that the homicide rate among black males fell dramatically. That drop was 18% in the 1940s and 22% in the 1950s. Then, the black homicide rate suddenly shot up by 89% in the 1960s.
Thus, to clear thinking people, Cook’s analysis of black crime rates is more hysterical than historical. Rational minds simply cannot attribute this huge increase in black crime in the 1960s, which occurred nationwide and in Wilmington, to the “legacy of slavery.”
Nor did increases in homicide among blacks have anything to do with terrorist acts committed by white Democrats against black Republicans around the turn of the century. Cook has simply identified the wrong Democratic atrocity. She should be focusing on the War on Poverty, which resulted in skyrocketing rates of black illegitimacy. When that war began, families headed by only a single mother raised about a fifth of black children. Within a third of a century, families headed by only a single mother became the normal environment in which black children were raised.
But Cook cannot speak honestly on this issue because she supports welfare. She also supports slavery reparations. So she has to ignore the more recent data in order to make demonstrably false insinuations about the legacy of slavery. In a nutshell, she is not interested in addressing realities. She is interested in maintaining visions.
Sadly, this is more than professional incompetence on Cook’s behalf. She is knowingly advancing a false narrative. In her op-ed, she states, “For example, we know that prior to 1898 African Americans here owned homes and successful businesses, and there was a thriving African American middle class.” But that was after the Civil War. So the legacy of slavery argument does not hold water.
Nor does she have the moral authority to condemn the riots of 1898, which were perpetrated by her political party and which resulted in blacks having their property taken away. She states that “The generations to follow lost the inherited prosperity that would have come to them had the massacre never happened.”
This would seem to be a strong moral condemnation of taking people’s property with force. But Cook is a Marxist. Thus, her political ideology revolves around taking other people’s property with force. At least Professor Cook isn’t a racist who would take property only from blacks. Seeking equality, her fellow Marxists would take it from everyone.
Cook furthers her intellectually dishonest brand of identity politics by stating that “we need to acknowledge that most violent crime is perpetrated by men and boys. We also have to acknowledge that young African American and Latino men have shockingly high rates of violent victimizations.” She could have also stated the obvious point that:
Other African American and Latino men commit the vast majority of these crimes against African American and Latino men. 
But Cook will not say that because she is committed to only repeating statistics in a manner that denigrates men and promotes the Left’s grievance narrative.
Cook concludes her manifesto with this glib suggestion: “Let’s establish and fund a truth and reconciliation program to better understand and address the historical harms of racism in our city. And let’s deliberately cultivate a version of masculinity that promotes peace and responsibility, repairing the harm inflicted on our children.”
I have a better idea. Let’s reject the ideas of incompetent Marxist feminists who distort history in an effort to advance failed visions.
Mike S. Adams is a criminology professor, the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Progressive-Protesting-Understand/dp/1621570312">Letters to a Young Progressive</a>, and a columnist at Townhall and the Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter <a href="http://www.twitter.com/mikesadams">@MikeSAdams</a>.

ADAMS: Pin The Male And The Honky

Crime

Marxism

Race

A <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49475/not-typo-democrat-poll-shows-what-voters-think-ryan-saavedra">new poll out over the weekend</a> reveals House Democrats&#8217; so-called &#8220;Squad&#8221; — socialist Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (&#8220;AOC&#8221;), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) — to be about as popular among swing voters as venereal disease. According to <a href="https://www.axios.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-poll-democrats-2020-aeaa3771-f142-4059-b79e-1fed569dfdf9.html">Axios</a>, the poll surveyed 1,003 &#8220;likely general-election voters who are white and have two years or less of college education.&#8221; Ocasio-Cortez — she of &#8220;we&#8217;re running concentration camps at the border&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48808/ocasio-cortez-lies-about-concentration-camp-ryan-saavedra">fame</a> — polls within this group at a level closely approximating the popularity of cyanide: 52% underwater. And Omar — she of &#8220;Jews have dual loyalty&#8221; <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44100/watch-ilhan-omar-makes-most-blatant-anti-semitic-ryan-saavedra">fame</a> — polls within this group at a level closely approximating the popularity of cancer: An astonishingly low 9% (&#8220;not a typo,&#8221; Axios <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49475/not-typo-democrat-poll-shows-what-voters-think-ryan-saavedra">confirms</a>) of those polled approve of the deeply controversial firebrand.
Suffice it to say that the modern Democratic Party is not in a healthy place. The tail that is the Party&#8217;s harrowing leftist flank has long come to wag the dog that is the Party&#8217;s erstwhile — and nearly vanquished — establishment wing. The &#8220;Squad&#8221; now defines the Democratic Party among the very swing voters that the Party needs to court to remain politically viable in the 21st century. And as a bumptious menagerie of ragtag pariahs who share nothing in common other than a seething sense of hatred for America&#8217;s Founding-era creed, that &#8220;Squad&#8221;-driven Party is <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49056/hammer-democratic-party-fundamentally-unfit-lead-josh-hammer">fundamentally unfit to lead America</a>.
It should not be any wonder why so many swing voters have come to the conclusion that that is, indeed, the case.
The median American voter supports the sovereignty of the nation-state and opposes the radical open-borders/transnational agenda. The median American voter believes that culture and assimilation matter — and rejects the leftist/corporatist shibboleth that multiculturalism and cheap labor ought to dictate immigration laxity. The median American voter recognizes that Mogadishu values — to say nothing of &#8220;Communist Manifesto&#8221; values — are not interchangeable with the values of the American Founding. The median American voter supports reasonable — or, for that matter, any — restrictions on prenatal infanticide. The median American voter believes in free enterprise and the traditional virtue of pulling oneself up by the proverbial bootstraps — and not the failed and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43796/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">evil</a> socialist claptrap that, by historical consensus, led to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810">orders of magnitude more dead over the course of the 20th century</a> than Hitler could have ever dreamed of killing himself. The median American voter rejects vile Jew-hatred and stands firmly with morally like-minded nation-states like Israel — and rejects anti-Semitic conspiracy peddlers and apologists for genocidal Islamist <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44732/hammer-israel-must-destroy-hamas-once-and-all-josh-hammer">death cults like Hamas</a>. The median American voter thinks that it is actually totally fine to compare the ruthless murderers of MS-13 to &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45646/far-left-activists-democrats-media-spread-ryan-saavedra">animals</a>.&#8221;
The 2020 midterm election has all the makings of an electoral bloodbath for a Democratic Party that is defined by &#8220;Squad&#8221;-driven doltish zealotry for open borders, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49488/watch-lindsey-graham-unloads-aoc-and-her-squad-are-amanda-prestigiacomo">national self-hatred</a>, socialism, transgenderism-infused <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48929/pc-insanity-julian-castros-transgender-abortion-hank-berrien">science denialism</a>, utter lawlessness, and an ethos that prioritizes the <a href="https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-immigration-policy-focus-group-reaction-6d153f37-1b39-4a19-ad5b-cfdfaf48a2c0.html">well-being of illegal aliens</a> over the well-being of the American people. It is entirely possible that the &#8220;Squad&#8221; will single-handedly deliver Donald Trump a second term in office.
The Democrats&#8217; new civil war, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49463/house-democrats-nuke-aocs-chief-staff-twitter-ryan-saavedra">already well under way</a>, shows no signs of abating soon. Wise speculators ought to wager on the &#8220;Squad&#8221; to prevail in this grand battle royale between comically over-the-top Marxism and merely excessive leftism. But hey, at least AOC can sleep well knowing that she&#8217;s really taken it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), right?

HAMMER: AOC’s ‘Squad’ Will Destroy Democrats In The 2020 Election

2020 Election

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Communism

Democratic Party

Democratic Socialism

Donald Trump

Ilhan Omar

Leftism

Progressivism

In a new man-on-the-street video by PragerU, Will Witt visits the University of California San Diego to see what students think about Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. Witt got a mixed a reaction, some celebrating him, others not such big fans, but found that most of the students didn&#8217;t appear to know much about the iconic radical.
Part of what prompted Witt&#8217;s series of questoins was the new &#8220;Che Cafe&#8221; that opened up in connection to the student organization offices on campus. In a discussion with one of the students working with the &#8220;Che Cafe,&#8221; Witt is told that the place is designed to be &#8220;part student community center, part vegan kitchen,&#8221; a &#8220;safe space&#8221; and a space for &#8220;radical ideologies.&#8221;
When Witt asks if the cafe includes support of Trump among those ideologies, the student makes clear Trump supporters are not welcome. &#8220;Oh no, we mean more like leftist political ideas,&#8221; he says. He also explains that if anyone says anything that violates their policies banning &#8220;racist&#8221; and &#8220;transhobic&#8221; language, they will &#8220;kick them out.&#8221;
&#8220;Does that include no homophobia?&#8221; Witt asks for clarification about the banned &#8220;phobias.&#8221;
&#8220;No homophobia, no transhobia, no racism,&#8221; the student responds.
&#8220;I was wondering because it&#8217;s named after Che Guevara, who put a lot of homosexuals in prison in Cuba,&#8221; says Witt.
<a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-you-gay-che-guevara-would-have-sent-you-to-a-concentration_b_59cc0d9ee4b0b99ee4a9ca1e?ncid=engmodushpmg00000003">HuffPost</a> ran an op-ed in 2017 highlighting Guevara&#8217;s role in oppressing homosexuals, particularly gay men, in Cuba. Though he has been repeatedly held up by celebrities, activists and left-wing politicians as &#8220;a kind of Good Samaritan who fought against oppression and tyranny,&#8221; writes contributor Guillermina Sutter Schneider, he was in fact &#8220;an intolerant and despicable man&#8221; who helped establish the first Cuban concentration camp in 1960 &#8212; the first of many Nazi-inspired camps that included homosexual men, whose sexual preferences violated Guevara&#8217;s vision of the &#8220;new man&#8221; of the Marxist revolution.
<blockquote>
Anyone who deviated from the &#8220;new man&#8221; was seen as a &#8221;counter-revolutionary.&#8221; Such was the case of gay men &#8212;whom Guevara referred to as a &#8220;sexual perverts.&#8221; Both Guevara and Castro considered homosexuality a bourgeois decadence. In an interview in 1965, Castro explained that &#8220;A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.&#8221;
Che Guevara also helped establish the first Cuban concentration camp in Guanahacabibes in 1960. This camp was the first of many. From the Nazis, the Cuban government also adapted from the Nazis the motto at Auschwitz &#8220;Work sets you free&#8221; changing it to &#8220;Work will make you men.&#8221; According to Álvaro Vargas Llosa, homosexuals, Jehova&#8217;s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban priests, and others who were believed to have committed a crime against revolutionary morals, were forced to work in these camps to correct their &#8220;anti-social behavior.&#8221; Many of them died; others were tortured or raped.
</blockquote>
When Witt asks other students about Guevara, he gets some strong responses, including one guy who declares Che a &#8220;great man&#8221; despite his role in a number of human rights atrocities, but he also finds that some students&#8217; knowledge is limited to his iconic depictions. He also asks students about the name of a new building on campus, asking whether they&#8217;d prefer Guevara or Ronald Reagan.
Video below via PragerU:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="535" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RxtcdnNeYZU" width="951"></iframe></div>

Smoking Che

WATCH: Students Celebrate Che Guevara, Then Told About His Treatment Of Gays

Cuba

LGBT

Prager University

Socialism

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a <a href="https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/3633/Who-will-win-the-2020-Democratic-presidential-nomination">leading contender</a> for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination who has often polled behind only former Vice President Joe Biden, has long had a soft spot for Communist nations. As Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bernie-sanders-unearthed-video-recalling-excitement-castro-revolution-cuba">reported</a> last month, a recently unearthed video from 1986 showed Sanders praising the Fidel Castro-led Communist revolution in Cuba:
<blockquote>
Unearthed video footage showed 2020 hopeful Bernie Sanders recalling his excitement surrounding the Cuban revolution in the 1950s.
&#8220;I remember, for some reason or another, being very excited when [former Cuban dictator] Fidel Castro made the revolution in Cuba,&#8221; he said, while speaking at the University of Vermont in 1986.
&#8220;I was a kid &#8230; and it just seemed right and appropriate that poor people were rising up against rather ugly rich people.&#8221;
</blockquote>
The Reagan Battalion has also tweeted out the video of Sanders praising Castro.
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Uncovered video<a href="https://twitter.com/BernieSanders?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BernieSanders</a> in 1985 praising the Communist Castro regime in Cuba and admitting on camera that he traveled to Nicaragua to advise the Ortega regime on how to successfully fight the United States. <a href="https://t.co/qYtpvbVvCS">pic.twitter.com/qYtpvbVvCS</a>
&#8212; The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) <a href="https://twitter.com/ReaganBattalion/status/1098034970856181760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 20, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
In a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43796/hammer-bernie-sanders-entire-worldview-grotesquely-josh-hammer">Daily Wire op-ed</a> in February, furthermore, I elaborated on Sanders&#8217; long history of dalliances with the Leninist thuggery of the Soviet Union:
<blockquote>
Toward the end of the hellish Cold War, facing a hegemonic Soviet arch-nemesis whose only reason for not annihilating us via nuclear holocaust was a game theory-backed faith in &#8220;mutually assured destruction,&#8221; Bernie Sanders <a href="https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sanders-hes-a-diehard-communist/">honeymooned</a> with his second wife in the Soviet Union. Toward the end of the hellish Cold War, facing a hegemonic Soviet arch-nemesis whose only reason for not annihilating us via nuclear holocaust was a game theory-backed faith in &#8220;mutually assured destruction,&#8221; Bernie Sanders flew a hammer-and-sickle Soviet flag in his Vermont mayoral office. At the end of the hellish Cold War, facing a hegemonic Soviet arch-nemesis whose only reason for not annihilating us via nuclear holocaust was a game theory-backed faith in &#8220;mutually assured destruction,&#8221; Bernie Sanders willfully addressed a known front group for a political party whose members swear an oath of allegiance to that very hegemonic arch-nemesis.
</blockquote>
Now, according to reporting from <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/bernie-sanders-campaigned-for-marxist-party-in-reagan-era">the Washington Examiner</a>, it turns out that the FBI has even investigated Sanders for his former ties to and campaigning for an overtly Marxist political party operating in the United States:
<blockquote>
Bernie Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers Party in the 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns and was investigated by the FBI for his ties to the Marxist group. 
Sanders has always played down the extent of his involvement with the party, which included radicals who praised the Soviet Union and Cuban communists, and has denied ever being a member. Asked in 1988 about his role as an SWP elector in 1980, he said: &#8220;I was asked to put my name on the ballot and I did, that&#8217;s true.&#8221; In fact, his ties to the party are deep and enduring. &#8230;
[In 1984,] he backed and campaigned for the SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, saying it was important for there to be &#8220;fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.&#8221; During the campaign, Mason praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions and said: &#8220;The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it&#8217;s still developing.&#8221;
</blockquote>
It is unclear, at best, whether Sanders will be punished by voters for this revelation in his presidential primary race in an increasingly hard-left Democratic Party.

FBI Investigated Bernie Sanders For Ties To Marxist Group, Report Says

Bernie Sanders

Each semester, I am reminded of the constitutional illiteracy of American college students. I cannot help but be reminded because I teach courses in criminal procedure and evidence, which often focus on various constitutional limitations on police conduct. Naturally, I have to test the students to see how well they understand the cases and the rules I teach and assign for outside reading. Sometimes their answers floor me. Here are just a few examples over the course of the present school year:
<ul>
<li>A student referred to the necessity of reading Miranda warnings in order to preserve the Fourth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.</li>
<li>Another student reminded me that the Fourteenth Amendment does not require states to incorporate the Sixth Amendment right to a grand jury proceeding.</li>
<li>A student casually mentioned the Second Amendment right to free speech. (Talk about shooting yourself in the foot during an exam!)</li>
<li>A student referred to the Seventh Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishments. And finally (as if that wasn&#8217;t enough),</li>
<li>A student answered a search and seizure question by referring to the Third Amendment warrant requirement.</li>
</ul>
Hardly a week goes by that I do not jokingly tell a student to go find a homeschooler and ask him if he has an extra pocket copy of the constitution he would like to loan out. Like most jokes, my quip has an element of truth. In fact, this one has a firm basis in reality.
Indeed, it has been obvious for quite some time that the constitutional illiteracy of our students can be traced to the constitutional illiteracy of our public school teachers. And after years of neglect it has now become firmly entrenched among university professors. If you think that is an exaggeration, please consider the following:
<ul>
<li>Last year, while observing a lecture, I heard a university professor tell students, &#8220;Because it is a living document, our constitution has survived for thousands of years.&#8221; The professor who made that statement has a PhD in criminology from a public university. If you think that was an isolated incident, consider another example,</li>
<li>When a professor asked me which course I most enjoy teaching and why, I replied, &#8220;Criminal procedure because of the heavy emphasis on Fourth Amendment law.&#8221; The professor responded by asking, &#8220;Which one is the Fourth Amendment?&#8221; The professor, who teaches courses in criminology, has a PhD in sociology from a public university. If you think that was an isolated incident, consider another example,</li>
<li>A professor offended by one of my columns on The Daily Wire decided to respond (or perhaps just vent) with a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. The professor conceded in his letter that the First Amendment protected my columns. But then he observed that the columns were also in violation of my university&#8217;s &#8220;Seahawk Respect Compact,&#8221; which is a policy that bans disrespectful speech. Thus, he specifically called for formal sanctions to be imposed on me by the university.</li>
</ul>
Let that sink in for a moment. The professor is a tenured sociologist who actually believes that the First Amendment is trumped by university policies. In other words, he asserts that when the constitution says one thing and the university handbook says another, the handbook wins. Apparently, he considers the university handbook the supreme law of the land. The professor, as you might have expected, earned his PhD in sociology at a public university.
To state the obvious, the task of curing constitutional illiteracy among college students is pretty difficult when it is also rampant among university faculty. Unfortunately, the problem is made even worse by the outright hostility some faculty members have for the constitution. That hostility became evident a few years ago when my university began hosting events for &#8220;constitution day&#8221; during each fall semester.
When we decided to host a constitution day for the first time I was excited. The organizers had decided to invite a faculty member to speak at the event. Although I had just won a major First Amendment lawsuit against the university, I did not expect the faculty organizers to pick me to speak. After all, there are at least 500 people teaching at my university. And several of us teach classes that focus on constitutional issues. Any one of us would have been perfectly acceptable.
But there is one professor who would not have been acceptable as a choice to speak on constitution day. A tenured Marxist feminist was the only member of our faculty to ever lose a constitutional case in federal court. I know this only because I am the one who sued her. Let me be very specific about the outcome of that suit: She was named as a defendant in a federal First Amendment lawsuit, twice refused to settle the case, and thus became the principal defendant in the federal jury trial. The jury, which ironically was made up mostly of women, took less than two hours of deliberation to find the Marxist feminist liable. And (as if you did not see it coming), here is the kicker:
The Marxist feminist loser of the suit was the chosen speaker on constitution day.
This really sums up the problem with constitution day. It was designed to increase respect for the constitution. But Marxists who wish to destroy the constitution have hijacked it. This also sums up the problem with our constitutionally illiterate student body. Tenured radicals who are also constitutional illiterates are teaching them. But like all bigots, they eventually become hostile towards things they do not understand.
Keep that in mind the next time you say that the &#8220;solution&#8221; to the &#8220;problem&#8221; of constitutional illiteracy is a return to teaching civics in our public schools. Like our constitution day, a civics class taught by a progressive educator would soon devolve into an attack upon our foundational principles.
A better approach would be a wall of separation between school and state.
Mike S. Adams is a criminology professor, the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Young-Progressive-Protesting-Understand/dp/1621570312">Letters to a Young Progressive</a>, and a columnist at Townhall and the Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter <a href="https://www.twitter.com/mikesadams">@MikeSAdams</a>.

ADAMS: Our Constitutionally Illiterate Faculty

Constitution

Education

Last week&#8217;s column discussed the highly publicized university corruption scheme wherein wealthy parents bought admission at prestigious universities for their children. That is dishonest and gives an unfair advantage to those young people but won&#8217;t destroy the missions of the universities. There is little or no attention given by the mainstream media to the true cancer eating away at most of our institutions of higher learning. Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, explains that cancer in a Minding the Campus <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y9ds7e7t">article</a>, titled &#8220;What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University.&#8221;
Professor Salzman argues that for most of the 20th century, universities were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. There was open exchange and competition in the marketplace of ideas. Different opinions were argued and respected. Most notably in the social sciences, social work, the humanities, education and law, this is no longer the case. Leftist political ideology has emerged. The most important thing to today&#8217;s university communities is diversity of race, ethnicity, sex and economic class, on which they have spent billions of dollars. Conspicuously absent is diversity of ideology.
Students are taught that all cultural values are morally equivalent. That&#8217;s ludicrous. Here are a few questions for those who make such a claim. Is forcible female genital mutilation, as practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries, a morally equivalent cultural value? Slavery is currently practiced in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan; is it morally equivalent? In most of the Middle East, there are numerous limitations placed on women, such as prohibitions on driving, employment and education. Under Islamic law in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning. Thieves face the punishment of having their hands severed. Homosexuality is a crime punishable by death in some countries. Are these cultural values morally equivalent, superior or inferior to Western values?
Social justice theory holds the vision that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. The theory holds that by their toxic masculinity, heterosexual white males are oppressors. Among their victims are females, people of color and male and female homosexuals. The world&#8217;s Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims.
Increasingly, the classics of Western civilization are being ignored. Why? Because they represent the work, almost exclusively, of &#8220;dead white men.&#8221; Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors are seen as virtuous. The same is true with political history. The U.S. Constitution should be less respected because its writers were white slaveholders. The academics who teach this nonsense to students are grossly ignorant of the struggle over the slavery issue at our 1787 Constitutional Convention.
Professor Salzman concludes his article with the observation that &#8220;Marxist social justice offers all the answers anyone needs, so no inquiry or serious research is required. Be confident that at university your children will learn &#8216;the right side&#8217; to be on, if little else.&#8221; As a result of leftist indoctrination, many college students graduate illiterate, innumerate and resistant to understanding. A <a href="http://tinyurl.com/yymfsrg4">survey</a> of employers showed that over 70 percent found college graduates were not well-prepared in skills such as &#8220;written communication,&#8221; &#8220;working with numbers/statistics,&#8221; &#8220;critical/analytical thinking&#8221; and second-language proficiency.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni publishes occasional reports on what college students know. One report found that nearly 10 percent of the college graduates surveyed thought Judith Sheindlin, TV&#8217;s Judge Judy, is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than 20 percent of the college graduates knew the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a quarter of the college graduates did not know Franklin D. Roosevelt was president during World War II; one-third did not know he was the president who spearheaded the New Deal. Such ignorance might explain why these young people are the supporters of today&#8217;s presidential candidates calling for America to become a socialist nation.
By the way, one need not be a Westerner to hold Western values. One just has to accept the sanctity of the individual above all else.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

WILLIAMS: More University Corruption

Social Justice

A 23-year-old Washington state resident was arrested earlier this month after posting threatening messages to cops on Facebook.
Jaydin Ledford, a self-described Marxist who, <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/jaydin-ledford-okanogan-county-sheriffs-office-sheriff-tony-hawley-omak-1339509">according to Newsweek</a>, &#8220;also claims to &#8216;speak for the trees&#8217;&#8221; posted several messages aimed at Washington cops, and even included a death threat naming Spokane Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich.
&#8220;Ozzie Knezovich is gonna get a bullet in his skull,&#8221; Ledford&#8217;s post read.
He also posted multiple death threats against cops after members of the police force publicly denounced a recently passed gun control bill (I-1639) which expands background checks and prohibits anyone under 21 from buying a semi-automatic rifle, among other things. The National Rifle Association has already filed a lawsuit against the law.
&#8220;I-1639 is law,&#8221; Ledford wrote on Facebook. &#8220;[S]heriffs that are non compliant will be shot. By me.&#8221;
In another post, according to Newsweek, Ledford wrote, &#8220;I really want to kill a police officer.&#8221;
Sheriff Knezovich, who was named in one of Ledford&#8217;s posts, told the media outlet he found the threats &#8220;ironic.&#8221;
&#8220;This is an individual who wants to ban guns &#8212; except he wants to kill people,&#8221; Knezovich said.
Ledford was arrested on federal charges of <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao/file/851856/download">cyberstalking</a>. From Newsweek:
&#8220;According to the statute, cyberstalking includes &#8216;any course of conduct or series of acts taken by the perpetrator on the Internet that place the victim in reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury, or causes, attempts to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to the victim or the victim&#8217;s immediate family.'&#8221;
Sheriff Tony Hawley told the outlet Ledford was also charged with harassment, and that the sheriff&#8217;s office was informed of the young man&#8217;s threats by a &#8220;concerned citizen.&#8221;
Hawley told Newsweek he encouraged his deputies to patrol in pairs in case they encountered Ledford, and worried the 23-year-old may have inspired others to take out cops.
Ledford was arrested just a couple days after Christopher Paul Hasson, a former U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant on <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/43747/former-coast-guard-lieutenant-self-proclaimed-ashe-schow">the other side of the fringe political spectrum</a>. Hasson, a self-proclaimed white nationalist, was arrested on drug and weapons charges, and police discovered an arsenal at his home and a cache of steroids and other drugs.
&#8220;When law enforcement raided Hasson&#8217;s apartment, they said they found a locked container loaded with more than 30 vials of what appeared to be human growth hormones. He has also ordered more than 4,200 pills of the narcotic Tramadol since 2016, along with synthetic urine to allegedly bypass possible random drug screenings at work,&#8221; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/self-proclaimed-white-nationalist-planned-mass-terror-attack-government-says-i-am-dreaming-of-a-way-to-kill-almost-every-last-person-on-earth/2019/02/20/61daf6b8-3544-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html">The Washington Post reported</a>.
Police also discovered that Hasson was a fan of right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik and had a list of potential targets, including multiple high-profile Democrat politicians and media personalities.
While Hasson doesn&#8217;t appear to have posted threats on social media, his stash of weapons along with Breivik&#8217;s manifesto and the Democrat hit list is certainly concerning. And it appears he may have been considering an attack, writing in a draft email two years ago about a &#8220;bombing/sniper campaign.&#8221;
Officials from the Baltimore FBI field office and the Coast Guard Investigative Service arrested Hasson last Friday.

Self-Proclaimed Marxist Threatened Cops Who Oppose Gun Control: You ‘Will Be Shot. By Me’

Washington

&#8220;Ideas have consequences,&#8221; says Prof. Paul Kengor of Grove City College in a new <a href="http://www.prageru.com/videos/who-karl-marx">video</a> for PragerU. &#8220;Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. And sometimes catastrophic &#8230; like the ideas of Karl Marx.&#8221;
With the popularity of socialism on the rise in the United States, Kengor takes a few minutes to unpack the &#8220;cataclysmic&#8221; legacy of the theorist who helped popularize communism and call out those who try to defend it by claiming it&#8217;s never really been implemented.
&#8220;Born in Trier, Germany in 1818, Marx didn&#8217;t invent communism,&#8221; says Kengor. &#8220;But it was on his ideas that Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union, Mao built communist China, and innumerable other tyrants, from the Kims in North Korea to the Castros in Cuba, built their communist regimes. Ultimately, those regimes and movements calling themselves &#8216;Marxist&#8217; murdered about 100 million people and enslaved more than a billion.&#8221;
Kengor breaks down how Marx and his patron Friedrich Engels blamed capitalists for all of the world&#8217;s woes, calling for a &#8220;worker&#8217;s revolution&#8221; to overthrow their alleged oppressors. This would eliminate privately owned means of production, transportation, and credit, giving total control of virtually everything to the state. 
&#8220;Wherever Marx&#8217;s ideas were practiced, life got worse,&#8221; says Kengor. &#8220;Not by a little; but by a lot. There is not a single exception to this rule. Not the Soviet Union, not Eastern Europe, not China, not North Korea, not Vietnam, not Cuba, not Venezuela, not Bolivia, not Zimbabwe. Wherever Marxism goes, economic collapse, terror and famine follow.&#8221;
Prof. Kengor explains how history does not remember communist and socialist regimes in a good light, but Marx never lived to see how his theories nearly tear the world apart. 
&#8220;If you&#8217;re still a fan of Marxism after all the death, suffering, and destruction it&#8217;s caused, that&#8217;s your right,&#8221; he says. &#8220;But own up to it. Don&#8217;t hide behind the &#8216;it&#8217;s never really been tried&#8217; line.&#8221;
You can watch the video below:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="377" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/UhEkJ4noN68" width="670"></iframe></div>

PragerU: Who Is Karl Marx?

Conservatism

Dennis Prager

In the latest video from PragerU, Toronto University clinical psychologist <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/29133/book-review-dr-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life-jacob-airey">Dr. Jordan Peterson</a> warns parents that &#8220;<a href="https://www.prageru.com/videos/dangerous-people-are-teaching-your-kids">dangerous people are teaching your kids</a>.&#8221; The prevalence of &#8220;post-modernists&#8221; in academia, Peterson explains, has resulted in students being taught radical ideas, including a general disdain for Western civilization and a form of nihilism based in the belief that all truth is subjective.
&#8220;You may not realize it, but you are currently funding some dangerous people,&#8221; Peterson says. &#8220;They are indoctrinating young minds throughout the West with their resentment-ridden ideology. They have made it their life&#8217;s mission to undermine Western civilization itself, which they regard as corrupt, oppressive and &#8216;patriarchal.'&#8221;
He continues, &#8220;If you&#8217;re a taxpayer, or paying for your kid&#8217;s liberal arts degree, you&#8217;re underwriting this gang of nihilists. You&#8217;re supporting ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective; that all sex differences are socially constructed; and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems. They are the post-modernists, pushing &#8216;progressive&#8217; activism at a college near you.&#8221;
He explains how these teachers, professors, and faculty are facilitating violent protests against anyone who might have an opinion that they pronounce dangerous. 
Dr. Peterson explains, &#8220;It&#8217;s now possible to complete an English degree and never encounter Shakespeare, one of those dead white males whose works underlie our &#8216;society of oppression.'&#8221;
He adds, &#8220;To understand and oppose the post-modernists, the ideas by which they orient themselves must be clearly identified.&#8221;
Peterson breaks down these progressive teachers&#8217; ideology, the tactics in implementing them, and how they are rooted in the teachers of Karl Marx, the co-author of &#8220;The Communist Manifesto.&#8221;
&#8220;The corrupt ideas of the post-modern neo-Marxists should be consigned to the dustbin of history,&#8221; says Peterson. &#8220;Instead, we underwrite their continuance in the very institutions where the central ideas of the West should be transmitted across the generations.&#8221;
Watch the video below:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="377" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LquIQisaZFU" width="670"></iframe></div>

Jordan Peterson: Dangerous People Are Teaching Your Kids

Jordan Peterson

Liberalism

Professionalism in the college classroom is on the decline. Since the 2016 election, professors all around my campus (UNC-Wilmington) have become much more inclined to use the classroom as a platform to spout political beliefs wholly unrelated to the course subject matter. In the case of one professor, the emotional trauma of Trump&#8217;s presidency eventually caused him to become so uncivil and unprofessional that he has now found himself without a job. The story of how that came about can be instructive for conservative and Christian students who find themselves subjected to pervasive abuse in the classroom.
In November of 2017, I first heard rumors of a professor using his class to viciously attack Republicans &#8211; even going so far as to hurl profanities at male students for voting for Trump. The belligerent Marxist was lucky he did not get punched out for aggressively attacking these young male students in the presence of their peers. In fact, those male students are to be commended for having more restraint than their professor.
Shorty after the rumors started to surface, it became apparent that most of this professor&#8217;s ire was actually reserved for conservative females taking his courses. In fact, between early November and the end of the semester, three female students came forward to complain. These students sought me out because they knew I was likely to be the only professor who would listen to them and actually help them do something about the problem. Their complaints were all consistent but each one added an interesting element to the previous complaint.
The first woman to complain spoke of the professor&#8217;s tendency to call dissenters fascists and to actually tell them to shut up whenever they expressed disagreement with him. It seemed lost on the Marxist ideologue that &#8220;shut up&#8221; is more in line with fascism than anti-fascism.
The second woman added that the professor was also making bizarre sexual remarks in the classroom. The comments that were reported were simply disturbing. They were also utterly irrelevant to the course subject matter.
The third woman added that she was being singled out for her religious beliefs and that other students were being told they suffered from mental disorders simply for disagreeing with their &#8220;anti-fascist&#8221; instructor. According to this student, one of her classmates was actually told to go seek immediate psychological counseling simply for disagreeing with the bullying instructor.
I encouraged the second and third woman to go to the department chair to report the &#8220;anti-fascist&#8221; Marxist instructor. In fact, I had little choice with regard to the second one &#8211; given the sexual nature of the classroom remarks.
With regard to the third complainant, there was a different reason for sending her to the department chair. In frustration, she tape-recorded the lectures and thus had direct proof of the instructor&#8217;s verbal abuse.
Fortunately, the story ends well. A few short weeks after presenting the tape to the department chair, the instructor was gone from the university. This leads us to a fundamental ethical question:
Is tape recording and reporting abusive leftist professors an act of &#8220;McCarthyism,&#8221; or is it a moral necessity?
Tape recording a professor presents no legal problem in the State of North Carolina, even if it is a one-on-one conversation outside the classroom. But the battle against abusive professors must also be won in the court of public opinion where surreptitious recording of people is deemed a distasteful enterprise, to say the least. Accordingly, I offer several pieces of advice to students who wish to fight against classroom abuse by using the tape-recorded words of their professors as evidence:
1. On the first day of class, always ask your professor for his or her permission to record lectures. This just makes sense from a test preparation standpoint. You might need to clarify or close gaps in your notes before examinations. But if problems develop with a professor, it helps to be able to say that recordings were done with the professor&#8217;s permission. This helps you maintain the moral high ground in a conflict situation.
Note: If the professor refuses to allow you to record the lecture, drop the class. This is usually an indication that he plans to conduct a politicized class that does not stick to the subject matter. Hence, he wishes to keep what happens in his class from being widely known.
2. When problems develop, always seek to resolve them with the professor. Professors occasionally correct abuses when confronted. It is rare, but it does happen. If the professor does not listen to your concerns, then you can legitimately say that an appeal was necessary. If you do not try, then you lose credibility down the road &#8211; or, more accurately, up the ladder.
3. When the professor recidivates, go to the department chair with recorded evidence. Where there is a pattern of behavior and speaking to the professor was of no avail, make sure your have documented evidence before you go up the ladder. Transcripts of a lecture will greatly enhance the chances of the department chair taking you seriously.
4. Work your way up the chain of command. If the chair does not listen to you, see the appropriate dean. If the dean does not listen to you, write the university president. If the president does not listen to you, write the Board of Trustees. If the Board of Trustees does not listen to you, go to the press.
5. Pick your battles wisely. Finally, note that none of this applies to professors who simply offend you with their radical views. Using a recording to complain about a professor and demand disciplinary action should only occur after the professor attacks you personally and/or silences your views.
Thankfully, because of a few brave women who picked their battles wisely and supported their claims with evidence, my university now has one less unhinged &#8220;anti-fascist&#8221; drawing a salary from the State of North Carolina. That&#8217;s one down, and several hundred more to go.
Mike S. Adams is a Professor of Criminology at UNC-Wilmington, the author of Letters to a Young Progressive, and a columnist at TownHall.com. Follow him on Twitter.

ADAMS: One Less ‘Anti-Fascist’ Professor

Free Speech

Religion

This week marks the birthday of one of history&#8217;s worst human beings, Karl Marx. Just because Marx&#8217;s philosophy would lead directly to the deaths of 100 million human beings over the course of a century, the imprisonment of tens of millions more in gulags and re-education camps from Russia to China to Vietnam to Cambodia to North Korea, and the oppression of hundreds of millions more hasn&#8217;t dissuaded those on the modern western left from embracing Marx&#8217;s bloody legacy. Realizing, however, that embracing Communism itself might alienate those who remember the Berlin Wall, today&#8217;s Marxists rally instead for identity politics. In the pages of the New York Times &#8212; the same newspaper that in the past two years has run opinion pieces endorsing Communism&#8217;s impact on female empowerment and female sexual activity and its inspirational effects on Americans &#8212; Kyung Hee University associate professor of philosophy Jason Barker celebrated Marx&#8217;s birthday, writing, &#8220;Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!&#8221;
What, exactly, was Marx right about?
He wasn&#8217;t right about economics &#8212; his theory of economics is tripe. He wasn&#8217;t right about history unfolding as a glorious Hegelian progression toward a socialist utopia either. But according to Baker, he was right about one thing: The dispossessed of the world would unite to change human nature by changing the system of oppression under which they lived. Marx, says Baker, was right about class exploitation &#8212; the rich exploiting the poor. But it&#8217;s in the guise of victim groups based on race and sex that Marx&#8217;s dialectic finds its true apotheosis:
<blockquote>
Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the &#8220;eternal truths&#8221; of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.
</blockquote>
Here, Baker is merely rehashing the writings of members of the Frankfurt School Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse, who argued that
<blockquote>
human beings who have lived in the shadow of this culture, the victims of the power structure . . . now oppose to the &#8220;music of the spheres&#8221; which was the most sublime achievement of this culture their own music, with all the defiance, and the hatred, and the joy of rebellious victims, defining their own humanity against the definitions of the masters.
</blockquote>
Instead of a revolution of the proletariat, then, Marxism now seeks a revolution of the victims &#8212; the various groups of dispossessed who feel that the system has been stacked against them. And it is far easier to unite such groups around intersectional themes than it is to unite them around income disparity. There may not be any serious brotherhood between those who don&#8217;t earn much money, but pure tribalism forms lasting ties &#8212; and Marxists are happy to mold those tribes into a new nation of rebels.
<a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/karl-marx-legacy-millions-murdered-enslaved-in-poverty/">Read the rest by clicking here</a>.

Shapiro At ‘National Review’: Karl Marx, You Were Wrong

On Monday, Kyung Hee University associate philosophy professor Jason Barker penned an op-ed for The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opinion/karl-marx-at-200-influence.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&amp;smtyp=cur">celebrating Karl Marx&#8217;s birthday with this exciting headline</a>: &#8220;Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!&#8221; If he was, the people north of the 38th parallel might have an interest in hearing about it, but Barker earned his space in the Times, which has spent the last two years reviving talk of communism&#8217;s glories in articles like &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/opinion/sunday/when-communism-inspired-americans.html?mcubz=1">When Communism Inspired Americans</a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/opinion/finland-station-communism-socialism.html?mcubz=1">Socialism&#8217;s Future May Be Its Past</a>,&#8221; and &#8220;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/why-women-had-better-sex-under-socialism.html?mcubz=1&amp;mtrref=www.google.com&amp;gwh=AE886440E2AD53CDCE4E484F455BD5C8&amp;gwt=pay&amp;assetType=opinion">Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism</a>.&#8221;
So, how was Marx right &#8212; aside from the mountains of corpses created under the rubric of his ideology? According to Barker, Marx was filled with &#8220;boundless intellectual enthusiasm.&#8221; And Barker criticizes Marx&#8217;s reliance on Hegel: &#8220;If ever there were a convincing case to be made for the dangers of philosophy, then surely it&#8217;s Marx&#8217;s discover of Hegel.&#8221; But then Barker gets to his case:
<blockquote>
Today the legacy would appear to be alive and well. Since the turn of the millennium countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx&#8217;s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.
</blockquote>
What, exactly, was Marx right about? According to Barker, he was right that &#8220;capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit.&#8221; But this is idiotic. Unless Marx could show involuntary removal of labor by the upper classes, there was no basis for the accusation of labor &#8220;appropriation&#8221;; that case still can&#8217;t be made in a free and open society. And as for Marx&#8217;s &#8220;prescient &#8230; conviction that capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself,&#8221; that conviction isn&#8217;t prescient &#8212; it&#8217;s just true that Left-wing intellectuals have ginned up opposition to the free exchange of goods and services for political benefit.
But according to Barker, Marx&#8217;s real contribution was his solution to the problem of capitalism. What is his solution? There was &#8220;no magic formula&#8221; for exiting capitalism. But there were &#8220;critical weapons&#8221; for doing so.
What were these weapons? Deconstruction of the prevailing order. &#8220;The key factor in Marx&#8217;s intellectual legacy in our present-day society is not &#8216;philosophy&#8217; but &#8216;critique&#8217;&#8230;&#8217;[the] ruthless criticism of all that exists.&#8217;&#8221; Except for his own premises, of course. But society itself could be changed through critique. Says Barker:
<blockquote>
Racial and sexual oppression have been added to the dynamic of class exploitation. Social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, owe something of an unspoken debt to Marx through their unapologetic targeting of the &#8220;eternal truths&#8221; of our age. Such movements recognize, as did Marx, that the ideas that rule every society are those of its ruling class and that overturning those ideas is fundamental to true revolutionary progress.
</blockquote>
In other words, you&#8217;re not an individual &#8212; you&#8217;re a widget created by the system. And enlightenment thought can&#8217;t free you from your widget-dom &#8212; only destroying the prevailing structure can. Identity politics can be the tool for destroying the system that robs life of meaning:
<blockquote>
We have become used to the go-getting mantra that to effect social change we first have to change ourselves. But enlightened or rational thinking is not enough, since the norms of thinking are already skewed by the structures of male privilege and social hierarchy, even down to the language we use. Changing those norms entails changing the very foundations of society.
</blockquote>
This, of course, is where the dead bodies come in. It turns out that human beings aren&#8217;t widgets. They do have the capacity to choose, and they do have the ability to reason. And treating everything you don&#8217;t like as a symptom of a system of oppression leads you to treat individuals as either tools or obstacles to utopia. Marx knew that and didn&#8217;t care. Neither, apparently, does Barker.
Thinkers for all of time have looked for a way to transform the nature of humanity. They&#8217;ve all failed. Their attempts, at a collective level, have led to genocides and gulags. But so long as the dream of the new human being prevails, the whiff of death will never leave the pages of Marx.

NYT Celebrates Marx’s Birthday With Op-Ed: ‘Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!’

On Monday, Canadian clinical psychologist Prof. Jordan Peterson joined Fox News to discuss his recent appearance on HBO&#8217;s &#8220;Real Time&#8221; with Bill Maher, where he talked about the dangerous narrative of victimization.
Appearing on &#8220;FOX &amp; Friends,&#8221; Peterson discussed the recent media-created controversy surrounding Turning Point USA&#8217;s Candace Owens and her warning about the dangers of victimhood.
&#8220;I think that Candace is commenting about the danger of adopting a victimization-oppressor narrative,&#8221; Peterson said. &#8220;And it&#8217;s a narrative that the hard left has really been pushing ever since Marx: that the world is composed of those who are victimized and those who are the oppressors and everyone successful is an oppressor and everyone else is a moral victim &#8212; like a morally acting victim.&#8221;
Peterson continued, &#8220;It&#8217;s a very, very dangerous narrative. And it&#8217;s certainly one that is unbelievably widespread on university campuses. To look at the world that way, to look at the world through a world identity lens puts us back in a tribal situation and will produce conflict.&#8221;
Peterson also addressed the issue of division in the United States between the political left and the rest of the country.
&#8220;If you want a civil society, then people have to be civil to one another, and I see that breaking down,&#8221; Peterson said. &#8220;We&#8217;ve always regarded the individual as the measure in the West and that&#8217;s the best idea the world has ever had, and if we lose that, then it&#8217;s going to be catastrophic.
&#8220;Everyone should be pushing against that, whether they&#8217;re on the right or the left, if they have any sense,&#8221; Peterson continued. &#8220;The moderate left needs to dissociate themselves from the radical-left, and this is something they refuse to do.&#8221;
WATCH:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Dr. <a href="https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jordanbpeterson</a>: Left must respect Trump voters <a href="https://t.co/DsbKJYoLzn">https://t.co/DsbKJYoLzn</a>
&#8212; FOX &amp; friends (@foxandfriends) <a href="https://twitter.com/foxandfriends/status/988517904290328576?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>

WATCH: Jordan Peterson Explains What Needs To Happen On The Political Left

Fox News

On Tuesday, The Washington Post ran an op-ed from Elizabeth Bruenig touting the possibilities of a new economic system in the United States: socialism. That&#8217;s not a complete surprise, given the mainstream media&#8217;s sudden interest in Marxism again &#8211; The New York Times <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/21547/nyt-op-ed-all-its-flaws-communist-revolution-ben-shapiro">has run a series of pieces over the last year</a> praising Marxism from the perspective of women&#8217;s rights, &#8220;inspiring&#8221; Americans, the Harlem Renaissance, even from the perspective of having better sex. Bruenig&#8217;s piece, however, is a masterpiece of silliness, a veritable cornucopia of evil ideas repackaged in the mildewed bows of revolutionary optimism.
She begins by complaining that capitalism has hollowed out the &#8220;liberal&#8221; movement &#8212; liberals want to praise capitalism for its benefits, but ignore its downside. Instead, Bruenig suggests, &#8220;It&#8217;s time to give socialism a try.&#8221; Why, pray tell, would we try a system of government interventionism that has ended, every time, in heartbreaking poverty and mass death? (No, Sweden and Denmark aren&#8217;t socialist countries &#8212; they&#8217;re capitalist countries with redistributionist tendencies.) Because, says Bruenig, the ills of our society are almost entirely the result of capitalism. She excoriates Andrew Sullivan of New York Magazine for embracing capitalism while lamenting the rise of nationalism. She complains about Joe Biden, whom she says whines uselessly about America being &#8220;better than this.&#8221; She says that Americans are &#8220;isolated, viciously competitive, suspicious of one another and spiritually shallow; and that we are anxiously looking for some kind of attachment to something real and profound in an age of decreasing trust and regard,&#8221; and that all of this is &#8220;emblematic of capitalism.&#8221; Never mind that America&#8217;s social bonds remained strong while capitalism was ascendant; never mind that government interventionism has coincided with a breakdown in social cohesion; never mind that government-enforced conformity has a rude way of destroying &#8220;attachment to something real and profound.&#8221; No, it&#8217;s that we shop around for our products at the local grocery store. That&#8217;s the problem, obviously.
It gets worse. According to Bruenig, capitalism &#8220;encourages and requires fierce individualism, self-interested disregard for the other, and resentment of arrangements into which one deposits more than he or she withdraws. (As a business-savvy friend once remarked: Nobody gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they&#8217;re doing.)&#8221;
This is pure nonsense. Of course capitalism promotes individualism. So does liberalism, the root of human rights. And even the most ardent capitalists, like Ayn Rand, forcibly reject the idea that we should resent voluntary economic arrangements &#8212; in fact, believers in free markets see such resentment as the root of socialism, not capitalism. Furthermore, everyone gets rich off of bilateral transactions where everybody knows what they&#8217;re doing. In fact, that&#8217;s the only way to get rich. If you screw someone, you can&#8217;t very well have a repeat economic transaction with them. This zero-sum mentality only applies to socialistic misapprehensions about the nature of free and voluntary exchange.
But Bruenig continues:
<blockquote>
Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love &#8212; all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual.
</blockquote>
Now, this is a critique frequently made by social conservatives, who suggest that virtue is a necessity to preserve freedom, and that Judeo-Christian values and communities that spring from those values must be the underpinning of capitalism. But socialism doesn&#8217;t resolve those problems. It merely redistributes them: all relationships are now reduced down to numbers, and if those numbers don&#8217;t fit, people are made to fit the numbers. If alienation is the product of capitalism, then subjugation is the product of socialism.
Bruenig quickly skips over the totalitarianism of socialism, instead suggesting a &#8220;kind of socialism that would be democratic and aimed primarily at decommodifying labor, reducing the vast inequality brought about by capitalism, and breaking capital&#8217;s stranglehold over politics and culture.&#8221;
That&#8217;s a lot of buzzwords in a row. There is no way to &#8220;democratize&#8221; socialism &#8212; there is always a boss at the factory, whether it&#8217;s a government bureaucrat or an owner who has a stake in the success of the factory. You cannot decommodify labor, because labor is by its nature a commodity &#8212; it is a tradeable good to be bought and sold. And capitalism may create inequality, but it also creates prosperity for everyone, including those on the bottom end of the economic spectrum.
Bruenig continues nonetheless:
<blockquote>
I don&#8217;t think that every problem can be traced back to capitalism: There were calamities and injustices long before capital, and I&#8217;ll venture to say there will be after.
</blockquote>
Well, yes. Before capitalism, there was feudalism, monarchic tyranny, mercantilism, and bloody war with complete lack of economic progress. So there&#8217;s that. But Bruenig concludes:
<blockquote>
But it seems to me that it&#8217;s time for those who expected to enjoy the end of history to accept that, though they&#8217;re linked in certain respects, capitalism seems to be at odds with the harmonious, peaceful, stable liberalism of midcentury dreams. I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve reached the end of history yet, which means we still have the chance to shape the future we want. I suggest we take it.
</blockquote>
Bruenig&#8217;s path has already been taken. It leads to the gulag, to the prison camp, to the starvation of children. It leads to centralization of power and it leads to destruction of the individual. The fact that Bruenig can repeat the discredited nostrums of Lenin and Mao without even realizing it shows how our capitalist system has failed to educate its beneficiaries about just why they&#8217;re able to write garbage editorials for pay in the freest, most prosperous country in world history.

WaPo Columnist Pens FRIGHTENING Defense Of Marxism: ‘It’s Time To Give Socialism A Try’

Just as the legacy of Jim Crow, the evil inflicted upon South African blacks during apartheid was an atrocity. That does not mean, however, that evil should be inflicted upon innocent whites far removed from those horrific times.
The reconciliation that former South African President Nelson Mandela hoped to achieve in the 1990s has been all-but-jettisoned. As of last week, the South African parliament voted to<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/27688/shocking-south-african-parliament-votes-seize-land-hank-berrien"> seize all land</a> from white farmers without compensation, a motion largely prompted by the hateful Julius Malema, leader of the Marxist-Revolutionary Economic Freedom Party.
Since parliament passed the initiative, Malema, who has a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Malema#Racism_controversies,_hate_speech_convictions,_and_legal_issues">rap-sheet of racist rhetoric</a>, has been turning the anti-white hate speech up to dangerous levels. Just recently, he told crowds of followers to &#8220;go after a white man&#8221; in the name of &#8220;cutting the throat of whiteness.&#8221;
Malema&#8217;s speech focused on removing Nelson Mandela Bay mayor Athol Trollip from office because he is white.
&#8220;We have taken a decision that we are going to remove the mayor of PE [Port Elizabeth],&#8221; he said. &#8220;Because the mayor of DA in PE is a white man. So, these people, when you want to hit them hard &#8211; go after a white man. They feel a terrible pain, because you have touched a white man. &#8230; We are starting with this whiteness. We are cutting the throat of whiteness.&#8221;
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JAE27IMVivg" width="560"></iframe></div>
Prior to the vote last week, Malema also told parliament about the necessity of confiscating land from white farmers:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
It&#8217;s relevant and important to share CiC Julius Malema speech on expropriation of land without compensation <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LandExpropriation?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#LandExpropriation</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/EFFMotion?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#EFFMotion</a> <a href="https://t.co/NEhV8JeXxY">pic.twitter.com/NEhV8JeXxY</a>
&#8212; Azania Afrika (@SAYoungLion) <a href="https://twitter.com/SAYoungLion/status/968369715927232512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 27, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>

South African Politician: ‘We Are Cutting The Throat Of Whiteness’

Racism

Apparently, Vladamir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Josef Stalin got their idea for the Soviet Union from some other book titled &#8220;The Communist Manifesto&#8221; that was not written by Karl Marx, according to Raoul Peck, the director of the new film, &#8220;The Young Karl Marx.&#8221;
Needless to say, the movie depicts Marx, a <a href="http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/karl-marx-was-pretty-bad-person">man who bore an illegitimate son</a> with the housemaid and treated people with the same contempt as the ideology he scribed, with respect. Speaking with NPR, Raoul Peck said of the man&#8217;s work: &#8220;Today, his [Marx&#8217;s] analyses are even more urgent and necessary than before.&#8221;
When the anchor hit back at Peck by saying that communism failed in the Soviet Union, Peck played the the good ol&#8217; fashion &#8220;that wasn&#8217;t really communism&#8221; card.
&#8220;It did not influence the Soviet Union,&#8221; said Peck. &#8220;Marx and Engels would have probably been the first one to be shot &#8230;. this incredible monster that was fabricated after the Russian Revolution has nothing to do with their ideas.&#8221;
Asked by NPR why he made a movie that profiles the bromance between Marx and Engels, Peck said that the movie was a &#8220;response to the world I feel around me. And it&#8217;s what I call the rise of ignorance, of confusion, where experts or scientists who have worked their whole life on any subject &#8212; climate change or new energy &#8212; can be shut down by somebody&#8217;s opinion without having to demonstrate anything.&#8221;
You heard that right. A man who dismisses mountains of evidence of communism&#8217;s failure is lamenting about opinions not &#8220;having to demonstrate anything.&#8221; It&#8217;s as if his opinion on communism should be taken prima facie without any demonstration whatsoever except a fictional movie with a <a href="https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_young_karl_marx/">54% on Rotten Tomatoes</a>.
In the same interview, Peck likened Karl Marx to present-day gun control activists.
&#8220;Today, his analyses are even more urgent and necessary than before &#8230; even the young kids from Florida right now who are protesting and asking for more gun control,&#8221; he said. &#8220;They have understood the connection between money; between capital; between profit; and that there are people who are capable of choosing the worst decision if it will preserve their profit.&#8221;
A communist wanting to confiscate guns &#8212; how original.

Director Of ‘The Young Karl Marx’ To NPR: Marx ‘Did Not Influence The Soviet Union’

Today marks the first day of the racialist holiday known as Kwanzaa, or as <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/25086/kwanzaa-was-invented-insane-leftist-gangster-who-michael-j-knowles">Michael Knowles calls it</a>: a holiday &#8220;invented by an insane leftist gangster who tortured women.&#8221;
Invented in 1966 <a href="http://gazette.com/article/19049">by a convicted felon who was accused of torturing two </a><a href="http://gazette.com/article/19049">women</a>, the numbers of actual people who celebrate Kwanzaa have been hotly contested for several years now. The founder has claimed that as many as 28 million people celebrate it; the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=African_American_Cultural_Center&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1">African American Cultural Center</a> once claimed 30 million. However, in 2004, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwanzaa#Popularity">a survey</a> for the National Retail Foundation discovered that 1.6% of those surveyed in the United States celebrated it. Even one of Kwanzaa&#8217;s big proponents, <a href="http://articles.philly.com/2010-12-21/entertainment/25292844_1_kwanzaa-black-power-black-families" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">researcher and professor Keith Mayes</a>, estimates that roughly 1 to 2 million people in the United States celebrate the &#8220;holiday.&#8221;
Those are some interesting facts. No surprise, then, that the Smithsonian National Musemum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) included none of them on their list of &#8220;Kwanzaa facts&#8221; they shared to commemorate the day:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Habari Gani? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/OTD?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#OTD</a> in 1966, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kwanzaa?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kwanzaa</a> was founded as an African American cultural holiday, centered around seven principles based on African culture to build and reinforce community. Each day of Kwanzaa represents a different principle, or &#8220;Nguzo Saba,&#8221; in Swahili. <a href="https://t.co/RtSk0vXEqU">pic.twitter.com/RtSk0vXEqU</a>
&#8212; Smithsonian NMAAHC (@NMAAHC) <a href="https://twitter.com/NMAAHC/status/945658010961145857?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DYK?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DYK</a>? <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kwanzaa?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kwanzaa</a>&#8217;s name is derived from the phrase &#8220;matunda ya kwanza&#8221; which means &#8220;first fruits.&#8221; On the first night, the black candle in the center is lit&#8212;one candle is lit each evening in honor of the principles. <a href="https://t.co/GP13H6u6II">pic.twitter.com/GP13H6u6II</a>
&#8212; Smithsonian NMAAHC (@NMAAHC) <a href="https://twitter.com/NMAAHC/status/945670284253847552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
The colors of <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kwanzaa?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kwanzaa</a> are a reflection of the Pan-African movement representing &#8220;unity&#8221; for people of African descent; black for the people, red for their struggle, and green for the future and hope that comes from their struggle.
Learn more: <a href="https://t.co/2kYkksEsLD">https://t.co/2kYkksEsLD</a> <a href="https://t.co/NYTg5L9K3F">pic.twitter.com/NYTg5L9K3F</a>
&#8212; Smithsonian NMAAHC (@NMAAHC) <a href="https://twitter.com/NMAAHC/status/945679785635741696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
They forgot to say &#8220;invented by a convicted felon.&#8221; Thanks to the internet, people are no longer so gullible, and responded in force:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
What is &#8220;African culture&#8221; exactly? There are &gt;50 countries on the continent. Each with diverse cultures. Kwanzaa = a made up festivity originated by a woman beater.
&#8212; Ness Gordon-Dseagu (@Dseagu) <a href="https://twitter.com/Dseagu/status/945724892850384897?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Nobody in Africa even knows what <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Kwanzaa?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Kwanzaa</a> is
&#8212; Derek Dukes Landfair (@DukesLandfair) <a href="https://twitter.com/DukesLandfair/status/945745162604605440?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Invented in 1966 by a radical Black Panther fighter and convicted felon. Great.
&#8212; AfricanJon (@AfricanJon1) <a href="https://twitter.com/AfricanJon1/status/945707299397496832?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
Happy Symbionese Liberation Army Murderous Bank Robber day yall!<a href="https://t.co/JtZO1k6mKf">https://t.co/JtZO1k6mKf</a>
&#8212; Jin USAotome (@JinSaotome) <a href="https://twitter.com/JinSaotome/status/945685079476580352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
You forgot to mention that it was invented by a Marxist who kidnapped and tortured women.
&#8212; James Armato (@James_Warrior) <a href="https://twitter.com/James_Warrior/status/945770391611564032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 26, 2017</a></blockquote>
</div>

Smithsonian AA Tweets Out ‘Kwanzaa Facts,’ Misses Out On Most Important One

Kwanzaa

Young Americans are increasingly cold toward capitalism. According to the YouGov/Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation&#8217;s <a href="http://victimsofcommunism.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/YouGov-VOC-2017-for-Media-Release-November-2-2017-final.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism,</a> 44% of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country, while another 14% are partial to communism or fascism. Just 42% would opt for a capitalist country like the one we all live in.
Does this mean that we millennials are budding Trotskyites, eager to launch the worker&#8217;s revolution?
Probably not. For one, many millennials have only a fuzzy concept of what these different economic systems entail. Barely a third correctly identified socialism as a system &#8220;characterized by social ownership and state control of the means of production.&#8221; Nearly half could not identify capitalism as an &#8220;economic system based on free markets and the rule of law with legal protections for private ownership.&#8221; These labels simply do not mean as much to a generation with no memory of the Cold War, and our schools have largely failed to teach them.
Millennials&#8217; apparent fondness for socialism is also hard to square with our enthusiasm for entrepreneurship. A <a href="http://eig.org/millennial#1473667707197-bfde262a-83c9" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">2016 survey</a> found that 72% of millennials say &#8220;startups and entrepreneurship are essential for new innovation and jobs&#8221; and 62% &#8220;have considered starting their own business.&#8221; A separate <a href="https://group.bnpparibas/en/news/bnp-paribas-global-entrepreneurs-report-2016" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">survey</a> found that entrepreneurs under age 35 are launching more companies with bigger staffs and higher profit targets than those of the boomer generation.
In deed, if not in word, millennials are avid capitalists. Why, then, do so many profess a preference for socialism and communism?
Here&#8217;s a clue: According to the YouGov/Victims of Communism report, 53% of millennials feel that America&#8217;s economic system works against them, the highest percentage of any age group. We aren&#8217;t so much infatuated with socialism as we are frustrated with an economy we feel is rigged against us.
And the unfortunate truth is that America&#8217;s economy is rigged against young people.
Irrational <a href="http://ij.org/report/license-work-2/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">occupational licensing laws</a> often prevent us from pursuing our chosen professions. Government subsidies reward large, established interests at the expense of startups and small businesses. A convoluted tax code <a href="http://redalertpolitics.com/2017/09/27/millennials-get-behind-trumps-tax-reform/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">punishes entrepreneurs</a> and <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2017/09/06/taxes-and-the-sharing-economy" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">creates headaches</a> for anyone trying to earn extra cash through Uber or Airbnb.
The answer to these problems isn&#8217;t socialism. The tighter the government&#8217;s grip over the economy, the greater the capacity for special interests to rig the system in their favor. The 44% of millennials who long to reside in a socialist country ought to pick up a newspaper (or more likely, their capitalism-created smartphone) and read the latest headlines out of Venezuela, Cuba or North Korea. They aren&#8217;t workers&#8217; paradises.
The real solution is to unleash free markets, not destroy them.
Millennials had the misfortune to come of age during the Great Recession, which has diminished our perception of capitalism. Nevertheless, we have witnessed in our lifetimes the transformative effects of free market innovation. We traded in our flip phones for iPhones and uploaded entire libraries to our Kindles. We joined globe-spanning social networks and jump-started the sharing economy.
All these advances were made possible by free markets. Many innovations &#8212; including Facebook, Airbnb and Lyft &#8212; were born of millennial minds, and we are just getting started. But any challenge to the status quo is likely to be resisted by vested interests and government regulators, as we have already seen with attempts to limit the expansion of ridesharing and homesharing in cities across the country.
As more young people enter the workforce, launch startups and expand their businesses, they will encounter ever more government roadblocks. Rather than flirt with socialism, millennials should be the loudest voices in favor of reforming the tax code, easing occupational licensing laws and eliminating the government-granted privileges that stand in our way.
Millennials may have doubts about free markets, but our future success depends on them.
Carrie Sheffield is the executive director of <a href="https://generationopportunity.org/">Generation Opportunity</a>.

Millennial Marxists? Not So Fast

Capitalism

Economy

Millennials

On Monday, a video from the Joe Rogan podcast was uploaded to YouTube featuring actor and comedian Bryan Callen. Although Rogan and Callen&#8217;s conversation was lengthy, one moment in particular stood out:
<blockquote>
ROGAN: Free will, or the ability to do whatever you want, the, like &#8212; a freedom of expression, a freedom of pursuits breeds inequality. Because if you give people true total freedom, some people are gonna try harder than others &#8230;
CALLEN: Yeah, inequality&#8217;s not a bad thing &#8230; but remember, there&#8217;s a fundamental difference. What&#8217;s the difference between being an American and a Communist? An American believes in equality of opportunity. I&#8217;m not saying we have that, but that would be the goal. Then there is equality of outcome. The only way to have equality of outcome is to keep down the people that work harder, that are smarter, [that are] more talented. You&#8217;ve gotta make everybody equal. That&#8217;s, to me, a fundamental evil. That&#8217;s my problem with Marxism. What the f***, the only way to do that is with force. [There&#8217;s] no other way.
ROGAN: The problem is, it&#8217;s never worked.
CALLEN: No.
ROGAN: It&#8217;s never worked, and it almost always leads to, like, mass murder.
CALLEN: Right.
</blockquote>
Here&#8217;s the full video (pertinent portion begins at the 3:23 mark) [LANGUAGE WARNING]:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" gesture="media" height="385" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JIEtF4toWfw" width="720"></iframe></div>
The Daily Wire spoke with Callen to understand his perspective further. During our conversation, he elaborated on his statements regarding Marxism, as well as the social engineering of equality:
<blockquote>
We need to be very conscious of the difference between equality of opportunity &#8212; which I support and we should all have &#8212; and equality of outcome because to ensure that all of us are equal at the end of the day, or that there is some kind of a ratio that has to be satisfied, the only way to do that is to somehow have a central governing authority, and a coercive authority. If you really want to extrapolate, there would need to be an authority that has the power to penalize anyone who disagrees with their ideology, and the only way I can see that happening is if that governing body either takes from those who produce more or keeps them from excelling above a sort of golden mean.
This seems to be what happened in China&#8217;s Cultural Revolution, and the Russian Communist Revolution. Certainly, extreme examples in North Korea, and in Pol Pot&#8217;s Cambodia, but as we all know also, that [equality] doesn&#8217;t happen. The people closest to the Party and the military are the ones who ultimately become the elite, and so it becomes an economy of influence, not of merit.
</blockquote>
Callen concluded by noting his belief that &#8220;anybody who tries to socially engineer equality, which is the direction we seem to be moving in, is forcing an issue, and I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s the way to go.&#8221;

Actor Bryan Callen Slams Marxism: ‘A Fundamental Evil’

The <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/11/15/zimbabwe-army-takes-control-mugabe-and-wife-in-custody.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1510925100580000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHFyqXjSePGtVCf-gO-eOgOco82dg" href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/11/15/zimbabwe-army-takes-control-mugabe-and-wife-in-custody.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">end</a> of Robert Mugabe&#8217;s rule in Zimbabwe presents that poor beleaguered nation the chance to correct the missed opportunities of 1980, when Mugabe came to power and proceeded to dismantle democracy.
But it is also a chance to hit North Korea where it hurts &#8212; its secret African connections.
Earlier this year, The Washington Post <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/north-koreas-surprising-lucrative-relationship-with-africa/2017/07/10/c4e6f65d-30fe-4bd2-b178-d90daaac3007_story.html?utm_term%3D.19c10e7e6863&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1510925100580000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG11Io1g-As_25M_9S5w9OzS31Pqw" href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/north-koreas-surprising-lucrative-relationship-with-africa/2017/07/10/c4e6f65d-30fe-4bd2-b178-d90daaac3007_story.html?utm_term=.19c10e7e6863" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">reported</a>:
<blockquote>
For years, North Korea has used African nations &#8230; as financial lifelines, building infrastructure and selling weapons and other military equipment as sanctions mounted against its authoritarian regime. Although China is by far North Korea&#8217;s largest trading partner, the smaller African revenue streams have helped support the impoverished Hermit Kingdom, even as its leaders develop an ambitious nuclear weapons program in defiance of the international community.
</blockquote>
Zimbabwe is the most prominent of these, as best <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://www.newzimbabwe.com/opinion-30292-How%2Btrip%2Bto%2BNorth%2BKorea%2Bdevastated%2BZim/opinion.aspx%23.htm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1510925100580000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE7e9-GFA2sfhYiUOPJMmu18FcDlQ" href="http://www.newzimbabwe.com/opinion-30292-How+trip+to+North+Korea+devastated+Zim/opinion.aspx#.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">described</a> by Rob Attwell of the University of Edinburgh:
<blockquote>
In 1980, Robert Mugabe visited Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. The trip had a profound effect on him and, in the words of one of his aides, he returned to Harare &#8216;a different man&#8217;. What Mugabe admired most was Kim Il Sung&#8217;s absolute power and the apparent adoration of North Korean people for the &#8216;eternal president&#8217;.
Mugabe has often spoken of his admiration for North Korea&#8217;s Juche ideology, which stresses national self-reliance and Korean ethnic purity. He has compelled government ministers to read collections of Kim&#8217;s speeches. In addition, as noted by historian Benjamin R Young, Mugabe&#8217;s birthday celebrations are strikingly similar to Kim&#8217;s. They are characterised by marching, giant paintings of the president and dancing children.
</blockquote>
When Mugabe was still a Marxist guerrilla fighter during the regime of Ian Smith in what was then called Rhodesia, he received assistance from China and North Korea. Another armed group fighting against Ian Smith was the Soviet-allied Zapu, led by Joshua Nkomo.
Mugabe and Nkomo eventually came to power, and were to share leadership in Rhodesia &#8212; which they renamed Zimbabwe. But that was not enough for Mugabe. He wanted the North Korean model. In 1983, Mugabe&#8217;s North Korean-trained 5th Brigade launched the Matabeleland massacre &#8212; killing tens of thousands and driving Nkomo into exile.
Zimbabwe has become a repressive, isolated, economic basket case &#8212; very much the North Korea of Africa. Zimbabwe and North Korea have maintained their ties even after the Cold War. As Attwell points out, &#8220;In 2013, Harare sold yellowcake uranium to Pyongyang in support of North Korea&#8217;s nuclear program.&#8221;
North Korea&#8217;s dealings in Africa are conducted in secret; the fall of Mugabe presents us with an opportunity to discover those secrets and put an end to them. If we act quickly and reach out to the new rulers, they can seize the property (especially the documents) and weapons of the North Koreans before they can be destroyed.
There is precedent for all this. In 1982, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon yielded tons of PLO documents detailing the Soviet Union&#8217;s role in sponsoring a worldwide network of terrorist groups. In 1983, the Reagan administration uncovered tons of documents in Grenada, detailing the Soviet Union and Cuba&#8217;s plans to foment communist revolution in the entirety of Central America. In 2008, the Colombian military attacked a FARC encampment in Ecuador, uncovering computer files revealing Hugo Chavez&#8217;s ties to the narcotics trade. All of this intelligence proved vital to the United States in its battle to defend the free world.
Many stupid people over the years &#8212; from NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and future Sen. Jeff Flake (in his 1987 <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=https://gotnews.com/breaking-exclusive-gop-senator-backs-obamas-cuba-policy-praised-socialist-dictator-robert-mugabe-sotu/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1510925100580000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGZZ1cMTG9uKjR9S_kIc3v3FF5fcA" href="http://gotnews.com/breaking-exclusive-gop-senator-backs-obamas-cuba-policy-praised-socialist-dictator-robert-mugabe-sotu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">master&#8217;s thesis</a>) &#8212; have expressed admiration for Mugabe. They were wrong.
Let us &#8212; those who truly love and value freedom &#8212; pray for a better future for the people of Zimbabwe. And let us hope that an ally of the free world will emerge from this week&#8217;s events.

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