 Good afternoon, and hopefully the mic's on. Everyone can hear me fine. The title's probably a little hyperbolic. Up until 10 days ago, I was planning to give a very different lecture. I let Pat know. And she says, well, it'd be good if you can get me the new title, because I was about to publish the agenda, the final agenda, for the week. So I came up with this. I decided to leave it. I do want to thank Joe, Salerno, and Lou for giving me the time for this lecture. I also especially want to thank Susie in the library here. When I got here, I asked her to find me some books on the topic. And within an hour, she brought me about six to help fill in some color and some of the information on this. With that, I'll start. So the year 2020 is not passing quietly. We're witnessing events unthinkable even a few months ago. We're told to keep our antisocial distance. It's OK to wear a mask when we enter a bank. Follow the arrows on the floor of the supermarket. All the sporting events canceled. Homeschooling, even for university students like you, is now fully approved by all levels of government and society. Most relevant to this discussion, pot shops and liquor stores are deemed essential and churches during holy week or not. Add to this the protests, more specifically the riots. Police are told by government officials to stand down. Those who intend to defend their lives and their property are the ones who are judged. By the media and potentially by the government prosecutors and the courts. We've also learned that protesting and rioting wards off viruses. You don't need to wear a mask during these activities. And we're supposed to trust the science. What of all of this is directly relevant to you? Why did I feel it appropriate to change the topic of this lecture in the last days? Obviously, we're living through massive cultural changes. While culture always evolves, in the last several days, in the last several decades, the changes have been revolutionary. And I use the term purposefully. These changes are aimed right at you and those who have sat in your place over the last decades. The purpose is to create soldiers for the revolution. What I hear of college, and I know it's true in business and also in government, are stories of various cultural indoctrinations made ever more intense given the pretext for these recent riots. Politically correct speech to include even compelled speech, cancel culture, self-flagellation, a fight for a gold medal in the oppression Olympics. If you disagree with any of this, you're the fascist. To further cement this indoctrination is a requirement to take classes that tear down Western civilization. Even saying those two words in anything other than a scornful tone could be costly. There's a purpose behind this strategy. Events that we have been living through recently are not spontaneous or random. It's not accidental. These events are the result of a political strategy designed to strip us of our liberty. It's an insidious strategy. It's also very effective. Whether knowingly or not, those carrying out this strategy are using the playbook of the most successful Marxist thinker in history. Given the damage this strategy has done to the freedoms of the West, I consider him to be the greatest political strategist in history. And this is what I would like to discuss. Before beginning, I should give you fair warning on two points. First, much of this Marxist playbook sounds an awful lot like the wishes of simplistic libertarians. Libertarianism for children as a good friend once labeled this. And I will come back to this point more than once. Second, there will be a lot of discussion of Western tradition and culture in this lecture. Inherently, this will include Christianity. But if you want to understand the enemy's playbook, then this cannot be avoided. I know many libertarians push back hard on this topic. Christianity is unnecessary for liberty. In fact, it is an enemy to liberty. I will only ask that you keep in mind the most successful Marxist thinker in history believed that Christianity is the enemy to communism. It's what stood in the way of communism's advance in the West. For now, I'll just ask that you stay open to the possibility that he was right. Because when I look around me today, he sure appears to have been right. With this laborious introduction out of the way, let's begin. The political strategist of whom I am speaking is Antonio Gramsci. Malachi Martin summarizes the importance of Gramsci in his book, The Keys of This Blood. Quote, the political formula Gramsci devised has done much more than classical Leninism and certainly more than Stalinism to spread Marxism throughout the capitalist West. What is that formula? Gary North explains, noting that Western society was deeply religious, Gramsci believed that the only way to achieve a proletarian revolution would be to break the faith of the masses of Western voters in Christianity and the moral system that derived from Christianity. I've decided I'm just going to leave this slide up for most of the lecture because it's the context of the entire lecture. The first quote is the ends, the objective, and the second quote is the means. So it's all there. I'd say we could stop now, but I've written a lot of words, so we'll keep going. Religion and culture were at the base of the pyramid, the foundation. It was the culture and not the economic condition of the working class that was the key to bring communism to the West. To be fair to Gramsci, he didn't start this ball rolling. The West was doing a fine job of damaging its cultural tradition. One can point to elements of medieval Catholicism, the Reformation and the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, as I have previously discussed, and post-millennial piasted, you guys try saying these three words fast in a row, post-millennial, pietist, protestants, as Murray Rothbard so clearly demonstrated. These have all contributed to the destruction long before Gramsci hit the scene. But without these cracks in the armor, Gramsci couldn't have ever been successful. What's our current condition relative to Gramsci's objectives? I could speak to the destruction of the family, the loss of all meaningful, intermediating governance institutions, the absurdity of a good portion of what passes for university studies today, especially in the liberal arts and humanities, all of which are symptoms of the crumbling of the ultimate target at which Gramsci aimed. We have this year been given indisputable evidence as to the success of his political strategy in the response by Christian leaders to the coronavirus. Just as one example, from Kentucky, and I'll quote, when I asked Bishop John Stowe of the Catholic Diocese of Lexington what he would say to a pastor planning Easter worship, he was blunt. I would say it's irresponsible. He said, it's jeopardizing people's lives. I know we live in a fact-free world, but was it ever wise to believe that we were facing the Black Death? In pre-modern plagues, did Christian leaders act this way? The simple answer to both questions is no, yet we have churches closed during Holy Week. I cannot think of a better symbolic representation of the destruction of Christianity in the West, and such is the success of Antonio Gramsci. Who is Antonio Gramsci? He was an Italian Marxist, more accurately an Italian Communist, writing on political theory, sociology, and linguistics. His work focused on the role that culture and tradition plays in preventing communism from spreading to the West. Gramsci was born in 1891. He died in 1937. He was the middle of seven children. He was hunchbacked, either due to a malformed spine from birth or a childhood accident. It's not clear. Maybe I just haven't read enough. One of the stories has him falling from the arms of a servant down a steep flight of stairs. Though his family gave him up for dead, his aunt anointed his feet with oil from a lamp dedicated to the Madonna. Rather ironic. Continuously sickly, until the age of 14, a coffin for him was kept at the ready in his bedroom. I mean, imagine what that does to you, psychologically. His father was thrown in prison for political cause and his mother somehow kept the family alive. Prior to leaving Sardinia for Turin and university, he was a nationalist. Sardinia for the Sardinians. I mean, this was just a couple of decades after Italy consolidated into a country as Germany did at the same time. Upon arriving in Turin, he came upon the automotive factories of Fiat. It was here that he found the class struggle, the workers and the bosses. World War I made this clear. Half a million Italian peasants died while the profits of the industrialists rose. He left university and began writing. He founded a newspaper. Loredin Nuovo, The New Order. With its first issue delivered on May day 1919, he was a founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy and he was a member of parliament. With parliamentary immunity suspended by Mussolini, he was sent to prison. Several years later, a prisoner exchange was proposed by the Vatican. Send Gramsci to Moscow in exchange for a group of priests imprisoned in the Soviet Union. Mussolini put a stop to these negotiations in early 1933. It was during his time in prison when he wrote his famous prison notebooks, describing the contents as everything that concerns people. It comprised over 2,800 handwritten pages. 21 of the notebooks bear the stamp of prison authorities. Given the risk of censorship, he used bland terms in place of traditional Marxist terminology. Though completed by 1935, these were only published in the years from 1948 to 1951, not in English until the 1970s. By 1957, nearly 400,000 copies had been sold, and my sense is that's a lot. Suffering from various heart, respiratory and digestive diseases, he was eventually transferred to a prison hospital facility. On April 25th, 1937, the same day that he received news that he would be released, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and he died two days later. Through his notebooks, he introduced several ideas in Marxist theory, critical theory and educational theory. Most important was the idea of cultural hegemony, which was the unifying idea of Gramsci's work from 1917 until he died. So what is cultural hegemony? Why hadn't the Marxist revolution swept the West by the early 20th century? Gramsci suggested that capitalists did not maintain control simply coercively, as Marx would describe it, but also ideologically. The values of the bourgeoisie were the common values of all. These values helped to maintain the status quo and limited any possibility of revolution. While Lenin felt culture was ancillary to political objectives, as do many libertarians, Gramsci saw culture as the key. The working class would need to develop a culture of its own, separate and distinct from the common values of the larger society. Control their beliefs and you control the people. This was only possible if the hegemony of the ruling class was in crisis. John Comet expands on this point. Hegemony is described as an order diffused throughout society in all institutional and private manifestations. All tastes, morality, customs, including religious and political principles are infused with the spirit. This tone is set from the top, one class or group over the other classes. From Comet, quote, the fundamental assumption behind Gramsci's view of hegemony is that the working class, before it seizes state power, must establish its claim to be a ruling class in political, cultural, and ethical fields. There are three phases to the revolution in this regard. First is to take claim to be the ruling class in culture. Second is to seize state power. And the third is to transform completely the economic base. You can decide how far along we are in this path. A second important idea was Gramsci's focus on intellectuals. Gramsci believed that the working class would have to develop their own intellectuals with values that were critical of the status quo. This would require the takeover of the educational establishments and institutions. These intellectuals through the educational establishment in the state had almost a free reign to push forward the revolutionary idea. Gramsci's idea of intellectuals is much broader than academicians and the like. From the book, Gramsci's Politics by Anne Sassoon, Gramsci identifies two groups of these intellectuals, organic intellectuals coming from the working class, and traditional intellectuals, the clergy, philosophers, and academicians. This latter group presented a false air of continuity from their predecessors. Today I would include thought leaders from entertainment, sports, business, and politics into one or the other of these groups. Gramsci is the foundational theorist for what we now call cultural Marxism. When it comes to the importance of culture and the value of mass media and influencing the political and economic system of a country and economy, Gramsci's work spurred the growth of an entire movement in the field of cultural studies. Gary North describes Gramsci as the most important anti-Marxist theorist ever to come out of the Marxist movement. He was anti-Marxist because unlike Marx, he did not place the mode of production at the center of social development. Paul Piccone furthers this point. Gramsci's vision contradicted official Marxist-Leninist ideology, providing an ethical and subjective dimension superior to the former's materialism. Many libertarians, like Marx, are equally focused on the mode of production as the key to liberty, but on the other side of the coin, they are focused on economic freedom as the means to deliver liberty. For all, and like Marx, they virtually ignore or even despise any cultural aspects. Gramsci knew better, and it should be obvious by the comparison I'm drawing, he offers a lesson for all libertarians who believe that broader cultural questions beyond the non-aggression principle are irrelevant for liberty. Continuing with North, Gramsci argued and the Frankfurt School followed his lead that the way for Marxists to transform the West was through cultural revolution. The idea of cultural relativism. The argument was correct, but the argument was not Marxist. The argument was Hegelian. The Frankfurt School further developed the concept of critical theory. Critical theory teaches one to be critical of every prevailing norm, attitude, and cultural attribute in society. The purpose is to challenge power structures and hierarchies. Spelling out precisely the discourse of tolerance, Herbert Marcus of the Frankfurt School would write, quote, the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, and opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed. Violent revolution was not the answer. From Malachi Martin, while firmly committed to global communism, Gramsci knew that violence would fail to win the West. American workers would never declare war on their middle class neighbors as long as they shared common Christian values. Gramsci agreed with Lenin that there was an inner force in man, driving him to the workers' paradise. But he felt that the assumptions underlying this Marxian view were too basic and gratuitous. Yes, the great mass of the world's population was made up of workers, but this was insufficient as Martin would write. What became clear to Gramsci, this is Martin, what became clear to Gramsci, however, was that nowhere, and especially not in Christian Europe, did the workers of the world see themselves as separated from the ruling classes by an ideological chasm. These workers would not rise up against their co-religionists, those with whom they shared culture, custom, and tradition. They would certainly not offer a violent overthrow as long as these traditions were held in common. Gramsci found the logic of Marx as it found its home in Lenin to be futile and contradictory. Was it any wonder that the only state in which Marxism took hold was the state which held it together by force and terror? Without changing that formula, a Marxism would have no future. A common culture grounded in Christianity would always stand in the way, requiring ever-increasing terror or requiring a different path, Gramsci's path. Murray Rothbard noted the Gramscian long marched through our institutions in 1992, writing so colorfully, yes, yes, you rotten hypocritical liberals, it's a culture war. Angelo Codavia writes that there would be no need for brute force, contrary to the general Marxist view, transform the enemy into the soldier you need. He will then do the rest. Gramsci's method would be more Machiavellian than Marxist. In the place of the prince, it would be the party. Destroy the old laws, the accustomed ways of living. Inculcate new ways of thinking and speaking. In essence, introduce an entirely new language. Language is the key to the mastery of consciousness. Language can achieve what force never could. Reform the morals, reform the intellect. In this way, people who would otherwise never spend a minute on such things would become the most rabid soldiers. In the meantime, use their rules against them. The democratic process, lobbying and voting, full parliamentary participation, behave just like the Western Democrats, except all political parties, forge alliances where convenient. Unlike the majority of Marxists, Gramsci would make common cause with all leftists. Communists and non-communists alike. Every group with a bone to pick with tradition and Christian culture was an ally. Knowingly or unknowingly, they would assist in the communist cause. Martin writes, quote, Marxist must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural, and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bred. Regarding these alliances, Father James Thornton adds, in Gramsci's time, these included, among others, various anti-fascist organizations, trade unions, and socialist political groups. In our time, and he wrote this 20 years ago, in our time, alliances with the left would include radical feminists, extremist environmentalists, civil rights movements, anti-police associations, internationalists, ultra-liberal church groups, and so forth. Gramsci was writing in the interwar years, Christianity was already weakened foe. The Enlightenment divorced God from both the individual and reason. Nietzsche announced the death of God in the latter part of the 19th century. World War I was the crushing blow, leaving Christian Europe reeling. Gramsci spotted a wounded enemy, and he knew this is where the fatal blow to the West must be struck. Whatever was left of the Christian mind must be changed. Every individual, every group, and every class must think about life's problems without reference to God and God's laws. No Christian transcendence, at minimum, antipathy, and even positive opposition to any introduction of Christian ideals. These could not possibly be allowed in the conversation regarding the treatment and solution to the problems of modern life. I could say the same things about many libertarians. Yet who do you believe has a better understanding of human nature, of the direction where such a path leads? Antonio Gramsci or any libertarian who views the broader culture as ancillary or even irrelevant to liberty. The Christian culture is being destroyed, this we know. Who has been more successful given this path of removing Christianity? Is liberty defined as rights in property and life? Blossoming in the wreckage of this wake? Or is it the other thing? I think to ask the question is to answer it. Martin continues, all the meaning of human life and the answer to every human hope were contained within the boundaries of the visible, tangible, material world of the here and now. Limited to this material view offers the limits of meaning for us. Is it merely coincidence that the West is at the same time going through a crisis of meaning? We have no idea who we are, where we came from or where we are going. Given that we are told to believe that we are nothing but the result of random atoms smashing together randomly, why would we? Academic institutions were already well on their way. Proud of their position as vanguards of forward-looking thinking, these new Marxist interpretations of history, law and religion were like red meat to a hungry lion. Throw in easy to get student loans, extend the college experience to all, and add a couple million newly indoctrinated crusaders every year to the cause. Speak of man's dignity and man's rights. Speak of these without reference to Christian transcendence that underpins these. In fact, speak of the Christian transcendence as standing in the way of these. Tim Cook of Apple gave a speech that was precisely along these lines. Man's dignity and man's rights. While finding a way to mention Muslims and Jews, he made no mention of Christianity. As Jonathan Peugeot offers, what Cook is describing is a totalizing system, a system that includes everything except Christianity. From Cook's speech, there are only two values that matter. First is total inclusivity. Second is, don't oppose the system. Total inclusivity means no borders, not physical, whether for the state or your private property. No borders for mental, not for emotional, not even of your body. If you don't embrace total inclusivity by definition, you are opposing the system. Therefore, you are to be excluded. This was Gramsci's message, and it is Cook's. Jeff Dice describes such libertarians who believe that, liberty will work when humans finally shed their stubborn, old ideas about family and tribe, become purely rational free thinkers, reject the mythology of religion and faith, and give up their outdated ethnic or nationalist or cultural alliances for the new hyper-individualist creed. We need people to drop their old-fashioned sexual hangups and bourgeois values, except for materialism. And if I read that whole paragraph again, and instead of starting with the word liberty, if I started with the word communism, it would have been exactly what Gramsci was after. This hyper-individualist that many libertarians have in view was precisely the type of individual Gramsci desired for his project. Hans Hoppe offers that libertarianism is logically consistent with almost any attitude toward culture and religion. He writes, logically, one can be, and indeed, most libertarians in fact are, hedonists, libertines, immoralists, militant enemies of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. One can be these things and still be consistent adherents of libertarian politics. Hoppe says that libertarians can be this way in theory, but libertary will not be the result. You cannot be a consistent left libertarian because the left libertarian doctrine, even if unintended, promotes statist and libertarian ends. Gramsci understood exactly that which Dice and Hoppe describe. Gramsci believed that the destruction of these traditional values would lead to communism. Many libertarians believe that destruction of these same values will lead to liberty. Who do you think knows better? Murray Rothbard would add, contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture, usually including an ethnic group with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. Rothbard offers that Gramsci's hyper-individual is not a human being, yet hyper-individual is the view of many contemporary libertarians. Hoppe summarizes regarding what are known as left libertarian positions from his book, Democracy, the God that Failed. The views held by left libertarians in this regard are not entirely uniform, but they typically differ little from those promoted by cultural Marxists. In other words, the cultural views of libertarians such as these cannot be differentiated from Gramsci's. This is not to say these libertarians have communism in their sights. Yet look around us today. Is freedom advancing or retreating? We're sitting at a time when the evidence could not be more clear. We live in a narrative. The West had a narrative. There will always be a narrative. Destroying the traditional narrative will not leave a void. A new narrative will take hold. We're seeing it on the street, kneeling, washing feet, sitting with arms raised to heaven, the sainting of a Minneapolis martyr. Once we lose our story, our narrative, our tradition, we are lost. We are easily manipulated, not having any foundation of meaning. With no foundation, we blow freely in the direction of the new, loudest narrative. Narratives are always exclusionary and if you don't embrace the total inclusivity of this new narrative, you will be excluded. Christianity teaches one way of handling those who are excluded, those who are on the margins. Love, this new narrative teaches another and it does not bode well for liberty or life. Returning to Gramsci from Martin. Total materialism was freely, peacefully and agreeably adopted everywhere in the name of man's dignity and rights, autonomy and freedom from outside constraints. Above all, as Gramsci had planned, this was done in the name of freedom from the laws and constraints of Christianity. Create the autonomous, completely sovereign individual, freed from all hierarchies and freed from all responsibilities. Martin continues. Good. By just that process, authored by Antonio Gramsci, has Western culture deprived itself of its lifeblood. There's only one way to fight this battle, an embrace of objective values and ethics. Murray Rothbard knew this. He would write, what I've been trying to say is that Mises's utilitarian, relativist approach to ethics is not nearly enough to establish a full case for liberty. It must be supplemented by an absolutist ethic, an ethic of liberty, as well as of other values needed for the health and development of the individual. Grounded on natural law, that is the discovery of the laws of man's nature. Natural law, ethics beyond the non-aggression principle, which we heard about starting even Monday evening this week. This is an idea flowing from Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis and Murray Rothbard, among many others. Available for all to discover, Christian and non-Christian alike, through right reason. It seems to me that the true political divide today in society is not based on the stereotypical left and right, or liberal and conservative, or even libertarian and statist. But it's based on where one sits regarding natural law and objective ethics. Rothbard takes this idea of natural law quite seriously. I at no time, quote, I at no time believed that value-free analysis or economics or utilitarianism, the standard social philosophy of economists can ever suffice to establish the case for liberty. He makes a very blunt point in his book for a new liberty, the libertarian manifesto. And I'll quote Rothbard. The natural law provides the only short, the only sure ground for a continuing critique of governmental laws and decrees. I'll conclude. Friedrich Nietzsche would write in Twilight of the Idols. If you give up Christian faith, you pull the right to Christian morality out from under your feet. What is Christian morality, if not at minimum, the non-aggression principle? Antonio Gramsci understood this more than 80 years ago. It is his political strategy that is at the root of what we see happening today in universities, government, and society. I hope this is helpful to you to understand this background, perhaps gain some insight into why libertarians such as Hoppe and Rothbard concern themselves with matters of culture, tradition, and objective values when it comes to law and liberty. In any case, it would be helpful if more libertarians took Gramsci seriously. Liberty's enemies certainly are doing so, and by doing so, they are advancing. And this is what makes Antonio Gramsci the greatest political strategist in history. Thank you.