 One of my favorite phrases from Mises in his writings was he referred to some socialist writers as muddle-headed babblers I run across that all the time in Mises writing muddle-headed babblers, and maybe that's the title for next book That'd be a good good book title What I'm gonna talk about today is why why basically is why it's more important than ever To support the Mises Institute and the work of the Mises Institute And I'm gonna I'm gonna make this point in the context of a concept that Mises wrote about in his great book Socialism first published in German in 1922 and the last couple of chapters he talks about something called destructionism and And so I'm gonna talk about destructionism in Mises time and our time and it is this Phenomenon which is why like I said it is more urgent than ever to support the work of the Mises Institute And before I start I'll give you one hint as to why I think it's more important now than ever is that I've been teaching at the university level a long time and I got my PhD in 1979 when I was 24 and One of the big the probably the biggest difference I've seen in the students who come in to the university is Today they're already thoroughly brainwashed in cultural Marxism and socialism and political correctness Whereas 15 or 20 years ago. That was not true at least in my experience And then there'd be some percentage of them that would get all they'd be sort of Corraled by the the leftists on the campus who would pretty much waste their education years and turn them into sort of You know muddle-headed babblers basically and but today I've noticed that they're all very well Programmed what right when they get there and and that's the success of 25 or 30 years of K through 12 and beyond Propagandizing by what we call the cultural Marxist and so in but in Mises day these when he talks about Destructionism let me give you an idea what he had to talk about what he was talking about He said I'm gonna read just a few quotes from the book socialism first published in English in 1936 Socialism is not the pioneer of a better and finer world But the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created it does not build it destroys for destruction is the essence of it It produces nothing it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created Each step leading towards socialism must must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists That was also there's always a two-pronged strategy by the socialist one destroy the existing Institutions of society and then build their utopia step to whatever the utopia might be Then he said something that reminded me a lot of Sweden in Venezuela He said this progressive capital formation is the only means by which the position of the great masses can be permanently improved Socialism and destructionism proposed to use up capital so as to achieve present wealth at the expense of the future The policy of destructionism is the policy of the spin spin thrift who dissipates his inheritance regardless of the future And I know the story of Sweden is that there was a great high economic liberty Society in the late 19th early 20th century They had all these great entrepreneurs that created Volvo You know automobiles and in all companies like that sob and many others And then when they adopted their version of socialism in the 1950s They basically started eating up their capital and living off the efforts of previous generations until by the 1980s They had 500% interest rates and they've been trying to escape from that ever since and of course Venezuela the exact same Thing one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America for a long long time They adopted socialism basically in the 50s also and Each president that they elected since then they adopted democracy in 1958 I think of as a bigger Castro loving communists than the last guy and look at what has happened to them So they lived off the capital of the previous generation a Third quote from Mises. He said for Karl Marx quote all politics was only the continuation of war by other means The socialist parties who have taken the Marxist parties for their model have elaborated the technique of agitation the caging for votes and for souls the stirring up of electoral excitement the street demonstrations and the terrorism and This reminds me of I wrote notes here antifa black lives matter democratic socialists of America The the the muddle-headed babbling students who set buildings on fire and scream in the faces of Conservatives or libertarians who show up at places like Berkeley to give an invited lecture that that's Nothing new nothing new Mises observed that he made a comment also on the fake news of his day He said this the the literati are recruiting agents for socialism Since socialism must destroy society and they are paving the way for destructionism the literati He also made a comment that I put in the politically correct category of commentary He said this People's which have hailed with great enthusiasm The writings which call for the destruction of all cultural values are Themselves on the verge of a great social catastrophe. So he was criticizing what today we would call political correctness And then he sort of concludes that our whole life is so given over to destructionism That one can name hardly a field into which it is not penetrated Social art quite he put quotation marks over social social art preaches it schools teach it the church is disseminated And so that's destructionism And of course he talks about the methods. He says I want to have a brief discussion of some of the methods of Destructionism this is 1922 labor legislation compulsory social insurance Unemployment insurance nationalization Taxation and inflation is what he writes about and of course in his day He was also commenting on if you look at the communist manifesto Which I use in a cloud I have a class I teach called capitalism and its critics And I have had students read the communist manifesto and and then the works by social of socialism the book Socialism and go back and forth the good guys and the bad guys Read this and one of my students told me, you know, this is the fourth time I've been assigned the communist manifesto, but but this is the first time it wasn't looked at as a road map to the future True story Absolutely true and the same student once told me I didn't know there were I had no idea There were different schools of thought and economics. I thought it was all a system of equations mathematical equation This is a junior economics major told me that And of course if you look at the commie manifesto, it's a manifesto for how to destroy the existing capitalist society a Plank number one abolition of private property Plank number two. There's a direct quote a heavy progressive or graduated income tax Number three abolition of all rights of inheritance. That's another attack on private property number four is Confiscates confiscation of land of those who speak out against the government. That's a direct quote from the commie manifesto So that's a that's a twofer That's a destruction of private property and a destruction of free speech at the same time Number five centralization of credit in the hands of the state So, you know, I put I have a little picture. It says green span Bernanke and I Gave a talk The Kato Institute many years ago on the 100th anniversary of the Sherman antitrust act and I for some reason Alan Greenspan came up and a member mentioning that I read one of Greenspan's old articles on antitrust from one of his I and Randays and And I commented that well, that's before he became a central planner and Some of the people at Kato had a big sour puss looks on their face when I sit there I didn't want people to think of the Fed as a central planning agency of God for God's sake Centralization of communication and transportation Nationalization of all land and capital and my favorite free education in government schools So that was that was the recipe for destruction is a necessity and destruction is in the communist manifesto Which he was talking about and of course in our day. It's a little different The the methods of destructionism we you know, we've we've adopted all these things It's all you know in the United States. We've got every one of these things To some extent we've adopted them, but we're going even further today. We're much further today and You know that today's Marxist the ones are most influential go by the name of cultural Marxist a little different different variety of Marxism and As I said before well after the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late 80s and early 90s There was a conundrum among the Marxists. What are we going to do now? Some of them became what I call watermelons green on the outside red on the inside environmentalists Decided to try to destroy capitalism in the name of the worms and the bugs and the snakes and in the mother nature and all that sort of thing and The old-class conflict theory didn't fly because the working class never wanted to engage in a bloody revolution And take over the factories they just wanted to pay raise and better working conditions And so the Marxists of the day were very upset that the working class never bought into this So what do we do? Well, they set up a different type of class struggle It's no longer the capitalist class in the in the working class now It's the oppressor class and the oppressed class and basically the oppressors are white heterosexual males and the oppressed is everybody else And the goal So because the failure of the working class to to overthrow capitalism The goal now is the destruction of Western culture because some of the theorists people like Antonio Gromsky the Italian Marxist and George Lukacz. His real name is Georgie, but I'll call him George Lukacz They needed a change of strategy and their theory was that the reason why the working class did not embrace Marxist revolutions was that Western culture and Christianity blinded them to the Marxist truth They claim that the combination of Western culture, which of course would include classical liberalism the philosophy of classical liberalism and the institutions of capitalism themselves and Christianity created what Lukacz called a hegemonic power which maintains the Consent to the capitalist order So he said the the working class was too attached to Western culture and too attached to Christianity To to be able to be convinced into destroying the capitalist order Therefore, we must destroy Western culture and destroy Christianity and otherwise. We will never be able to be able to have our cultural revolution and One good thing that Mussolini did is he imprisoned Gromsky I Haptip to Benito Mussolini for for doing that After he started saying things like this, you know, and of course Gromsky is known for You know Western culture and Christianity must be destroyed by a long march through the institutions of schools media churches entertainment industry Etc. And you know, I mean I began noticing this the rules success that the Gromsky I'd send the cultural Marxists were having in the 1980s when that great intellectual giant Jesse Jackson let a Let a group of chanting 500 or so chanting students at Stanford They were chanting. Hey, hey ho ho Western cultures Western Civ has got to go at the time Stanford University was teaching a course in Western Civilization and they wanted to get rid of it, which they did Which they did they got rid of it and they replaced it with a course called race class and gender studies And so they succeeded in that around the same time There's a wealthy oil family from Texas the Bass family gave 20 million 20 million dollars to Yale University Which was sort of the family alma mater? There and to endow some Professorships and teaching various aspects of Western Civilization at Yale and the faculty not all not every single faculty member But a big proportion big portion of the faculty Revoltaed against this and ended up they had to give the money back They gave 20 million dollars back and at the time it was the biggest donation ever in the history of Yale University Biggest private donation. So so if there are any members of the Bass family watching I'm looking at the they're on the internet Send the money to the Mises We will have we will have a Degree granting program in all aspects of Western Civilization if you like we could do that with 20 million dollars Okay, so Stanford replaced that they gave the money back at Yale that the Yale faculty commend Condemned this proposal as it was quote dead white European male academic agenda And so they called for more multi we need what we need is more multicultural studies they said and for those of you who are not familiar too familiar with Multiculturalism in the academic context it doesn't mean what you think it means it means hiring Socialists of different cultures Asian socialists and African socialists in different culture at Indian socialists so long as the faculty are all socialists We want them to be from different cultures. That's what basically what multiculturalism means in the academic academic world now one of the heroes of the like I said of the today's cultural Marxist who run the entire educational system in America is the Hungarian Communist George Lukacs and he introduced he got a job in 1918 as Commissar of culture in Hungary and he introduced sex education There and his purpose was to destroy the traditional sexual morals as a part of their plan to destroy Christianity You know the project was to destroy Christianity so that the the great Marxist revolution of the working class could take place Hungarians didn't really go for it. So they kicked out the communists They totally kicked them out of government Didn't quite work out that way and of course This is all a part of you know what this became was the Frankfurt school Basically a gang of Marxist misfits and psychopaths mostly from Germany and a few Italians in there And they they came to America and they went of all places and many of them ended up in Santa Monica, California in the 1950s and in the 1950s Santa Monica must have been such a beautiful place And but they were just angry and hateful and disgusted They just hated everything so they write they wrote articles and books about how horrible American society was especially because it was it was the Most capitalist society around at the time and they were just they're just miserable And they wanted everybody else to be miserable at the same time about this and so it was originally called the Institute for Marxism But they decided that Marxism had kind of a bad name So they so they didn't quite you know, they eventually called it progressivism or you know, whatever That's what they called it when they decided let's just call us ourselves the Frankfurt school because who the heck knows what that is But the Institute for Marxism is a little different Okay, and so the you know the goal of the of the Frankfurt school is that they said that will people live under repression in Western culture and must be liberated from this repression and so they use such techniques as lionizing people like Bruce Jenner in a miniskirt in high heels. That's supposed to be That's sort of things mostly liberate us from our cultural repression. That's our new hero new role model for society people like that Okay, the role of education This is they said is not to educate but to instill the right values Okay, the right values and of course when you see these things these scenes on college campuses now when You know Charles Murray showed up at Middlebury College at the invitation of a philosophy professor there they had these these Muddle-headed little students showed up screaming in his face calling him a fascist and a Nazi and all these things and The woman the female Professor who and who invited him one of them grabbed her by the hair and jerked her so hard She injured her neck and had to go to the hospital an emergency room And they fled the campus Charles Murray and this professor fled the campus and these students chased them by car So it's a where they were the where they're going because they've been taught since grade school That these people are not only wrong, but they're evil and that's always been the Marxist method of argumentation They don't they wouldn't they would rarely argue with us They would just accuse us of being capitalist tools case closed You know, you don't really believe what you're saying. You're all you're an intellectual prostitute You're a capitalist tool and so this is the modern version of capitalist tool You're the tool of fascist or some evil group And so therefore if you're a Nazi, well, of course you need to be eradicated We don't want Nazis you know the size of that's what they're taught That's that's why you have you know they use these these young people as useful idiots and there I've seen in my whole career and I began teaching in 1979 I noticed that the older leftists on campus would always go after sort of the dumber students like that I won't mention the majors, but education education Go after and convince them to become Radical rebel Ralsers rather than going to the library and studying and getting a good education Okay, another hero of this movement is a Herbert Marcuse and He wrote a book Eros and civilization which became sort of the Bible of the sexual revolution of the 60s and one of the things He wrote in the book is don't work have sex. That's that's good advice for teenagers I guess good good career advice This is part of his that just attack on the whole idea of working, you know That's what makes the capitalist economy work doesn't it work You know when you desire and so demonizing work, you can and he advocated what was called polymorphous perversity Because remember the goal was always to destroy Western culture and Christianity and it was Marcuse who wrote an Essay that has been taken to heart by this movement in which he talked about liberating tolerance He made the case for for the abolition of free speech Among people who would advocate Western civilization the values of Western civilization including classical liberal ideas free market economy and so forth and Because these are the ideas of the oppressor class The oppressor class created these ideas and promulgates these ideas And so therefore on college campuses, especially he said it's only the oppressed who deserve free speech So when you see these little terrorists Doing things like you did at Middlebury College or Berkeley The they they think they're taking the moral high road by censoring alternative viewpoints They don't think they're being they're being fascist by by destroying freedom of speech and academic freedom They think they they'll tell you they're doing they're taking the moral high road because after all If you believe in such things as free speech Constitutionalism and all your you're a you're a fascist you're taught to be a fascist and and they did equate Christianity with fascism to Traditional morality just traditional morality is called fascist in this literature. So if you're a Not just a Christian, but anybody who believes say that the 10 commandments are a good guide for living then you're a Nazi You know, they equate they equate you That's why you see on college campuses. These these kids chanting no more fascist no more Nazis You know, they have no idea what the heck they're talking about But that's that but that's where this comes from and they're the useful idiots of the professors who teach them these things And there's always a couple of professors who are behind all these riots on the campuses. They're never spontaneous like like Ron Paul's and the Fed Thing was and so so that's that's the the destructionism of our time That is there's festered for the past 30 years In the American educational system and even it's even worse in other places like England And so that's what I meant when I said it is more important now than ever to support the work of the Mises Institute Because you know, we're one of the groups that are still doing everything we can To to educate these ideas of the Austrian school, which of course are a very important part of Western civilization And if you read Rothbard, of course, he wasn't just an economist He was he was a great scholar in all sorts of fields and of course classical liberalism I'm teaching a course right now where I put Mises book liberalism is on the second week's class in the in the reading and these students have never heard of any of this They're all sophomore junior economics students and and they've never heard of any of this when I brought Walter Williams to my university as one of my guest speakers he gave he gave his Can speech on the Constitution based based sort of the economics and politics of the cost to why Limited constitutional government is a good idea and I had student after student That's just the economics students come up to me and said I never heard any of this Thanks for thanks for bringing this guy to campus. I never heard this argument and these are these are all Young people who are 20 21 years old and and their parents are paying 60,000 a year for them to go to school and Never the first time they ever heard these arguments and so that again is why I think our work is is urgent Today that we do around here. Thank you very much