 Welcome everybody to Fantasy Island where the Fed was founded soon to be renamed Modern Monetary Theory Islands. A couple weeks ago I was doing a podcast interview with with on my new book The Problem with Lincoln. The book before that is The Problem with Socialism and my publisher told me if this one sells we're gonna do a series The Problem with. So if anybody has any problems let me know about it. I'll write a book about it. And anyway at the end of the interview he said well on another topic do you have any comments on the current destruction of the world that's going on? And I just so happened that I had prepared this speech on destructionism. So I talked a zero off about destructionism. And so what I'm with the theme of what I'm going to say in the short time I have is that in Misi's famous book Socialism published in 1922 the last couple of chapters are on something that he called destructionism. And if you when I listen what I have to say and if you've been watching television at all the news that on the last six months you can relate to what's been going on. He was talking about what we're seeing in America today all over the place. And another thing that I will put in your head before I continue here is that you know I just completed my 41st year as a university economics professor. And so I've been in that sandbox playing in that sandbox for a long time. And one of the things those of you who haven't lived in that world you know who has you know as much as long as I have really don't know what's been going on. Basically for the past 35 or so years apart from the engineers and the chemistry majors and the math majors and the business schools the humanities and the social sciences have been a socialist indoctrination academies. And we're talking 3035 years when Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book called Illiberal Education 30 years ago. The theme was they didn't call it socialism. They called it multiculturalism. But what they meant was well we want a Latino Marxist on the faculty. We want an Asian Marxist on the faculty. It's multicultural. Everybody has to be a Marxist. But as long as we have different cultures of Marxist that's what it meant. And he was saying that tongue in cheek but it was true. It's true. And so when you watch television and you see the riots all summer long all over the country and you notice that at least half of the rioters tend to be sort of college educated white kids under the banner of Black Lives Matter. That's why this is what they've been indoctrinated in in college. And so I want to read you a few things that Misi said about so called destructionism. Because that's what we're seeing. That's what we're saying. We're seeing Marxism in action. The socialist idea is nothing but a grandiose rationalization of petty resentments. So Misi's defines socialism as it's not the pioneer of a better and finer world but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It is not billed it destroys for destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing. It only consumes what the social order based on private ownership and the means of production has created. And so all socialism is about this destructionism on Karl Marx. He said this instead of refuting arguments of his opponents he tends to abuse them. His disciples has faithfully imitated the master's example, reviling their opponents but never attempting to refute them by argument. So the next time you read or see about a story of say someone like me or Tom Woods being invited to speak at an Ivy League school and a mob shows up and screams racist fascist scum and things like that at us. That's what's going on. That's exactly what Misi's was talking about in 1922. And it reminds me of this horrible incident that happened a couple years ago now. Charles Murray the famous political scientist going to invite to speak at Middlebury College and a riot broke out like this. And one of the students actually grabbed the female professor who invited Charles the political science professor. One of these punks grabbed her by the hair and shook her so hard that it injured her neck and she had to be taken to a hospital by ambulance. And that's the sort of thing that the young people have been taught to do thinking you're taking the moral high road when you do something like that. Of the socialist parties Misi said they have a lab. They have elaborated and use the word elaborate the techniques of agitation caging for votes for souls the stirring up of electoral excitement the street demonstrations and terrorism. That sounds pretty familiar doesn't it. If you watch TV over the summer terrorism by the military wing of one of the political parties and Tifa and what I call only black lives matter that that's pretty much what what you've seen on art and literature. Misi said the romantic and the social art of the 19th century have prepared the way for socialist destructionism. Without this help socialism would never have gained its hold on people's minds. Fiction is a favorite vehicle for this. And then he criticizes Charles Dickens. He says Dickens quote has taught millions to hate liberalism and capitalism. Such people are recruiting agents for socialism. He's talking about the arts and literature. And that sort of reminds me of some of my students in last year almost broke down in tears when I informed them that there's this famous book called Silent Spring that is the sort of the founding document of the environmentalist movement. And it's a fiction. It's not a scientific study. And it's called Silent Spring because the author argued that pesticides were going to kill off all the birds so that when springtime comes in a northern hemisphere it'd be silent. You won't hear any birds chirping. And I pointed out to them that while this and she predicted that Rachel Carson predicted by the year 2000. There'd be no more birds. And so and of course that was wrong. And anyway but that's but that was extraordinarily influential wasn't it. It led to the political environmentalist movement. And that's the sort of thing that Mises was talking about many decades before that. He also distinguishes between economic socialism and what he calls revolutionary socialism. And that's what we're seeing today is revolutionary socialism. He said this. It is primarily concerned to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one just destroying everything. OK. And he used all these examples mostly having to do with taxes and regulation and national nationalization and so forth. That was 1922. And so the next step of what happened after this was you've all heard of cult. I don't know if you all heard of it but cultural Marxism. There were a group of very influential academics from mostly from Germany. But then there's also the Italian Gramsci. Antonio Gramsci was part of this. And some of the names of the people associated with cultural Marxism are George Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkenheimer, Theodore Adorno, Eric Fromm, Franz Newman, Wilhelm Wright, Walter Benjamin, I don't know if any of you have read read any of these authors in school. But there but there were Marxists. They originally formed something called the Institute for Marxism. And then they decided that well since the Soviet Union was in its heyday at that time, that's probably not a good PR move. So they called it the Frankfurt School. And they eventually moved from Frankfurt, Germany and came to America. And now if you were to do a Google search of cultural Marxism, Google itself has had has it rigged so that you will see all these anonymous articles or articles written by people you never heard of claiming it's all a conspiracy, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that is critics, critics of cultural Marxism. So my Jewish friends like Paul Gottfried and Walter Block, who have criticized cultural Marxism, I guess, or anti-Semites because they bring it up. And that that makes me see his point, doesn't it, that you know, Marx himself and his followers, rather than argue and debate people on the facts, smear them and slander them and label them and call them names. So that's an example of the very method that they use. So if you look it up, that's what you'll find. But their basic theory, if you read some of the writings, is that these are people who are disappointed that the Marxist revolutions in Europe didn't really take place, didn't really occur. The Europeans did not want to take over the factories and run them and so forth. And they failed. And they decided that this whole class theory of Marx, or the capitalist class versus the working class, really didn't hit it off that well with the European population. They didn't embrace Marxism. They didn't embrace communism and so forth. So they had to concoct a different type of theory. And the different type of theory was to invent a whole new set of victim groups, basically condemning, basically heterosexual white males now, or the new oppressor class, and everybody else is the oppressed class. That's no longer the workers versus that capitalist, as far as that goes. So the cultural Marxists have been extraordinarily influential, despite what they say on these internet articles. And so Marx himself on destructionism, I dug up some comments that Marx himself said about destructionism. And this is all the same as what's today called cultural Marxism. So this is really nothing new. It comes right from Marx himself about abolitionism of different cultures. And so they took this destructionism to a much higher extent than Marx himself did. But here's Marx himself. The abolition of religion is a big black letters in a communist manifesto. Also, quote, the abolition of the present state of things and the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Communists everywhere support the revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. Now, doesn't that sound like what the so-called protesters are protesting? They want to abolish everything, tearing down all the statues of Columbus, and they even tore down an Abe Lincoln statue in a few places. Is everything in anything? Hold your applause, please, on that one. In a letter, he said this, he called for the ruthless criticism of all that exists. Criticize everything. Now, in modern academia, that's called critical theory. A former faculty colleague of mine in a business school put together a new course called critical theory. And I asked her, well, what academic discipline are you drawing on? Philosophy or what? And she said, no, we're just going to criticize people like you. And talking to some of her students, they don't teach them how to criticize anything. They teach them to denounce any idea that is not a socialist platitude. And so I talk to these students and they don't know how to argue, they don't know how to debate. All they do know how to do is denounce anything that is not a left-wing platitude. And so they're being grossly miseducated. They go into school at 18 years old in college and they come out dumber four years later with people like this. So Marx advocated the abolition of property, the family, nations, all existing societies. On religion, he said communism begins where atheism begins. Communism is incompatible with religious faith. So when you see these attacks on a lot of the churches, these are the sons and daughters of Karl Marx that you see in the streets of America today, here's one news article from the Catholic news agency. Not too long ago, June 1st. Church buildings in California, Minnesota, New York, Kentucky, Texas, and Colorado were attacked. Many of the defaced or damaged churches were cathedrals. The Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Denver sustained permanent damage. Vandals repeatedly struck the Denver Cathedral on multiple nights of the protests and riots over the weekend. The church building and rectory were spray painted with slogans, God is dead, there is no God, and so forth. And they seem to pick on Catholic churches a lot more than the other denominations. They apparently see the Catholic church as the chief enemy. Abolition of the family is in communist manifesto and a lot of you may have heard that the founders of only Black Lives Matter called for the abolition of the nuclear family. That's straight out of the communist manifesto. And now to see how widespread this idea is, if you're a left winger and you're a writer, the Nation Magazine is where you want your ideas to be. That's where they communicate with each other. He's been around forever, the Nation. There was an interview with a young author in the Nation Magazine named Sophie Lewis. She wrote a book called Full Surrogacy Now, Feminism versus the Family. And this is apparently the latest rendition of Marx's idea of abolition of the family. And so they're promoting these ideas as the new normal, I guess. Here are some of the things that Sophie says in her book. She says, arguably the most famous demand of the communist manifesto is the abolition of the family. And she approves of that. She says, women are instruments of production for the men who lord over them. Now, Marx himself said, children were just having children. All you're doing is you're providing workers for the capitalist to be exploited. So the hell with that? That was Marx's idea, by the way. Okay, another quote from Sophie Lewis's book. She calls mothers gestators, or quote, people who are carrying fetuses. Every miscarriage is a work accident, says Sophie Lewis. What is the family for? She has a section of her book. Well, what is the family for anyway? It's for, quote, training us up to be workers, training us to be inhabitants of a binary gendered, I guess that means male and female, right? Binary gendered. And racially stratified system, training us not to be queer. That's her definition of the family. As far as binary gender, I went to a medical clinic to get my allergy medicine once, and I had to fill out a form, not too long ago. And there was a gender, which gender? And there were 18 lists. 18. I don't know where they get 18. Not 17, not 19. Okay, a few more quotes from Sophie Lewis. Motherhood allows two greedy blood suckers to nourish themselves. These are the kind of people that the preeminent leftist magazine, The Nation, is highlighting in a big puff piece. She advocates what's called full surrogacy. From reading her writings, what I think that means is, well, if a woman wants to have children, she should just have it with anybody. It doesn't matter if it's a husband, no need for family. Marks and Engels said this. This is not Sophie Lewis again. Children are transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor. That's how they viewed children. And so does Sophie. And they also said, communist desire to introduce an openly legalized community of women. And so that's what's being taught by so-called feminist scholars in the universities that think that people like Sophie Lewis are the top authors. And so among other things that Marx and the Marxists wanted to abolish, in addition to the family, is individuality. Here's something from Marx. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. And so, and that's always been the collective discreet, hasn't it, you know, sacrifice yourself for the good of the community or the state, or some something defined by the government. Eternal truths. Marx himself was harshly critical of eternal truths. And he said this in one of his writings, communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and all morality. Instead of constituting them on a new basis, it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experiences. And in the road to serfdom, there's a chapter on the end of truth near the end of the road to serfdom by Hayek, where he talks about this. He says under, in a totalitarian system, truth is not discovered by research and education and discussion or debate, but it's dictated by, from the top, by the government. That's what the truth is. And so, you know, like I said, having spent more than 40 years as a university professor, I went from a period where there was a genuine search for truth for the most part everywhere in the university world, to today's world, where there are these certain socialist platitudes that are handed down, and it's become, in a lot of places, this totally violent to, sometimes, when the people, when the Charles Murray or someone like me would show up and be given a hard time, the last talk I gave that was invited talk was at a community college in North Carolina, and everything went fine, it was a great talk, but the faculty member who invited me had to call the police just in case to show up, because, you know, there's always a libertarian on campus, we better brace ourselves, I guess. Nations, Mark said, the working men have no countries. They wanted to abolish nations, the nation state all together, and the past, history. Mark said, tradition is a tool of the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society, the past dominates the present, in communist society the president dominates the past, so the, so reality is whatever the communist dictator would say it is, and so, and of course, doesn't that sound a lot like this, this impulse to tear down all the statues of everybody, no matter who it is, not just the, after they, they took down the statue of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton a couple years ago, and I wrote an article for lewrockwell.com at the time, and I think the title was the next target for Black Lives Matter, and I put together a whole string of Abraham Lincoln's racist white supremacist quotes on there, they, they didn't take me up on it, but I did hear that they have knocked down a couple of Abe Lincoln statues around the country, hold your applause please on that, and so these are all the things that, you know, the cultural Marxists really just carried forward the ideas of Marx himself, but in a different way by, because they believe that what really stood in the way of a socialist revolution was the family, if people are devoted to the family they're not devoted to the state, religion, if people think, you know, if God is your, is your savior, then, then Joseph Stalin cannot be your savior, or Joe Biden cannot be your savior, if God is your savior, and on and on, and so, and so they wanted to attack art and literature and education, we're all hindrances, and in addition to the family and education and religion, and those all had to be destroyed, wiped clean, so that we can have our new utopia, and of course they never explain what the utopia is or what it will look like, they just say we want a new utopia, and of course utopia always looks to the, looks better than reality, doesn't it, and so, and I think that's one reason why the young people are so enchanted with socialism, is they're not taught the reality of it, like they would be if they came here, but they're taught a utopia version, and my time is up, I don't want Peter Klein to come up here and drag me off the stage, as he has done before.