Roger Marsh: Well, welcome to Family Talk, the broadcast division of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. I'm Roger Marsh. On today's program, we're going to hear a popular and important conversation featuring our own Dr. Dobson and author, speaker and radio and TV host, Mark Levin.
Now, this program was recorded in September of 2021, so you'll be hearing Dr. Dobson and Mark Levin discussing some of the hot button news events from that summer. Those are issues that are still relevant today, by the way. Here now to introduce his guest for the next two days worth of programs is Dr. James Dobson for this classic edition of Family Talk.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, hello everyone and welcome to Family Talk. I'm your host Dr. James Dobson, and I am so pleased that you've joined us for this particular show. I think today's program could be one of the most important that we've aired in many years. What makes it so significant is driven by what's happening in America and the world at this time. We live in a far more dangerous place than even a month ago, and we desperately need to understand the times in which we live.
My guest today is going to help us address that concern. He's Mark Levin. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Temple University School of Law, but most of our listeners know and follow him on numerous media venues. He's seen every week on Fox News, which carries his show Life, Liberty & Levin. I try never to miss that show unless I absolutely have to.
He's a best-selling author and has a nationally syndicated radio program, The Mark Levin Show, which is one of the most listened to programs on conservative talk radio, perhaps the most listened to. If you follow him, you know that Mark makes us think, and now he's given us even more to think about by writing his New York Times best-selling book, American Marxism. It is a must read to be sure, and we're going to talk about that remarkable publication today. Mark, it's an honor. It's an honor to have you with us again.
Mark Levin: Well, Dr. Dobson, trust me the honor honor's all mine, and as I told you off-air and I want your audience to know how crucially important you've been to this country in my life throughout your career, and I want to thank you for everything you do and everything you've done.
Dr. James Dobson: Well, I heard recently that your new book, American Marxism, has sold more than 600,000 copies in a short period of time. It's probably more, how many is it sold now?
Mark Levin: As of today, over 900,000 copies.
Dr. James Dobson: Unbelievable. That's what we call a runaway best-seller. How do you account for that overwhelming response?
Mark Levin: Well, Dr. Dobson, I think the American people, maybe not all of us, but most of us love this country and they love the founding of this country and they love the Declaration and the Constitution and they love the idea of the nuclear family and they love their faith. They understand that these are all under attack and they're all under attack in a thousand different ways.
What used to be commonsensical, what used to be viewed as basic morality, what used to be viewed as a love of country and so forth, has all been turned inside out. The government has embraced these radical ideologies and they're trying to impose their views on us. And even our children, kindergarten, elementary school, the colleges and campuses are a runaway disaster. The borders are wide open intentionally to change the nature of the country.
There's a war on capitalism, which is this degrowth movement and on and on and on, and people are frustrated. They're not sure what to do. And what I've tried to do in this book is to take a very sober look of what's behind all this, these various movements, these ideologies and how they've been customized, if you will, and apply to American society.
And I spend a great deal of the book discussing this, and then at the very end of the book, I discuss some of the things, not all the things, but some of the things we should absolutely do to take it on. And I think people are looking for answers, practical hands-on common sense answers to try and get their country back. So I think that is why it's the most important book I've ever written. It is a bare knuckles explanation in plain English, although you got to have your thinking cap on, on what's going on in this country.
Dr. James Dobson: Mark, I left academia. I was at USC School of Medicine and I left there because I saw coming what we're experiencing now. And I at that time ached for somebody to write it, to say it, and you have done it in all your books, but particularly this one. I just really hope that many more people will be aware of it and have their eyes opened as to what's taking place. We're about to lose everything we care about, aren't we?
Mark Levin: Yeah. Yeah. We are losing our country. The question is whether we are going to claw our way back. They have succeeded in devouring most of our institutions and the culture, the media utterly corrupt. Academia is utterly corrupt, and then they protect themselves. They use our Constitution to protect themselves while they're destroying the Constitution.
They use free speech, academic freedom and tenure to protect themselves while they're destroying academic freedom and free speech. And this is a daunting task. It's very complex. And so what I try to do is take it piece by piece and I try to explain to people who have never been involved in anything before, "Look, I'm not asking you to put your life on the line.
I'm not asking you to change your life in any significant way, but we need your help. It's not enough to complain among ourselves over a Sunday night dinner or some social event and then think that's actually accomplished something." Our enemies, and I don't call them adversaries in the opposition, these are our enemies.
Our enemies are absolutely ruthless, and they mean what they say, listen to what they say and understand what they're doing, and they are busy from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed if they ever go to bed, 24/7, trying to figure out how to take down this country. And they're succeeding. They never had the backing of the masses or what they themselves call the proletariat. Never. They don't have the backing in this country either.
Dr. James Dobson: How did they pull us off? How did they go from being in the pretty dramatic minority, radical sounding words that didn't really resonate with the American people and the people of the world, how did they come to a position of dominance like they have today?
Mark Levin: Because the majority is not in revolution mode. The majority is relatively satisfied what's going on in our country. But they use propaganda, they use pseudo-events, they use pressure tactics, they use violence. They use whatever's available to them because they're mostly thugs. And most of the people in the majority are passive or they acquiesce to this. They're busy, obviously raising their families, making a living, law-abiding people of faith.
And too many of us are naive. But when you look at the world and you look at the history of mankind, it's filled with evil. It's filled with totalitarian societies in one form or another. We are an exception. There's only been a few exceptions, and those exceptions before us didn't last, they fell. As Reagan said, as others have said, this country cannot live in perpetuity as a free country unless the people are resolute in ensuring that it will.
I mean, we must vote, but that's not enough. We need to look at our neighborhoods, our school systems, think about where we're sending our kids to college. We can't just pretend that these corporations that have turned on us that we should continue to keep supporting them with enormous sums of money. We have these evil forces to blame, but we also have many of us to blame because we're not doing what needs to be done to sustain the society.
Dr. James Dobson: The name American Marxism implies that this originated with a man, Karl Marx. I'm reading an article now written by Thomas Sowell that is really outstanding. It talks about his upbringing in his early years, in his early writings. To what degree has he influenced what's taking place today?
Mark Levin: All these great thinkers of liberty and humanity have influenced me. I stand on the shoulders of people like Thomas Sowell. I've read Aristotle and Cicero and Adam Smith and Thomas Aquinas and anybody I can get my hands on. It seems to me that it's our responsibility to digest this information. I don't expect everybody to do the same thing, quit their jobs and do X, Y, Z, but there are things we can do just from our computers and in talking to our neighbors because we have to push back.
Dr. James Dobson: Talk about the state university system, what is going on there? Many people have kind of a vague notion of what happens there and yet they send their kids there. What is your take on it?
Mark Levin: People want, and mostly a lot of them, want to send their kids to Ivy League schools, want to go to Princeton or Yale or Harvard or Columbia or Stanford and so forth. These are the worst indoctrination mills in our country. And people think they're sending them to these schools, so they come out with these great degrees and they get a great job. Well, they come out with more than that.
And this is one of the reasons we have executives in our corporations now and in our boards of directors who are, as they call them, woke, which is an awfully passive term, but I guess that's the term we got to use these days. And I wrote another book about this called the Plunder and Deceit, and I go in deeply into how these professors are chosen. What happens is the faculty chooses the faculty and the faculty chooses the deans. And so you find in 70% of these Ivy League schools, they choose among themselves and the next crop of professors come out of the same system.
It's very incestuous. That's why you see very few truly outspoken religious or conservative professors, and if you have them, usually they're beaten down and often kicked out or afraid to say what they feel they need to say. So academic freedom is largely dead on our college campuses. The problem is you and I and everybody listening are paying for this, even these private colleges, mostly in state taxes, but also in federal grant programs and so forth to subsidize our demise.
And what I say in the book is, "Why are we doing this?" Particularly in Republican states with Republican legislatures and governors. We should be what I call, what they call BDSing these institutions. You know where the anti-Semites use BDS against Israel to choke them off economically to try and destroy that country? Well, we should use those BDS tactics against our colleges and universities and other institutions, boycott, divest and sanction. Slash their budgets, slash their budgets.
Dr. James Dobson: Would you as a dad send your son or daughter to a state university?
Mark Levin: I would do my best to send my son or daughter to a university that's not going to turn out a Marxist or a revolutionary or somebody who just flat out hates their country. And so you need to be informed yourselves as parents on where you want to send your kid. And you need to stand up to your kid if they want to go somewhere else and at least talk to them and try and persuade them.
I've said, and not to be self-serving, that wouldn't it be great if every kid going off to college or university this academic year had a copy of American Marxism under their arm and brought it into their classrooms? We can infiltrate these classrooms too. We can have our kids bring certain texts and books and ask the professors why they're not used. And in addition to clawing back funding in these institutions through the states, I say parents ought to get together and if their kid in philosophy is being taught how to be a malice, they should go to the administration and demand their tuition back.
And if they can't get their tuition back, they should hire one of these or enlist one of these conservative legal foundations or others and sue them and bring a whole lot of lawsuits and be litigious just like the left is. Use some of the tactics that they use. These classrooms do not belong to them. These college campuses do not belong to them. Let's start clawing back, defunding them, sanctioning them and putting them on defense and let them to respond to us.
Dr. James Dobson: I think the thing that disturbs me most about what's happening today is the way Marxism and those principles has penetrated the public schools. And it starts in kindergarten in its own way. How in the world can we rest that away from those who are indoctrinating our kids and twisting and warping them from an early tender age?
Mark Levin: It's not easy. There's a lot of things people can do. First of all, you can homeschool your kids if you're able to. A lot of people work and they're not able to. Secondly-
Dr. James Dobson: That's growing by the way dramatically.
Mark Levin: That's growing and it should. Even if you can't. Now neighborhoods are coming together with parents who are homeschooling, say two or three or four kids at a time. And you have parents who may not be public school teachers but are professionals and have very good backgrounds in a whole variety of areas or parents who aren't professionals but are quite capable of reading the curricula that the kids need to be taught and that is growing.
I read something in 1973, some small number of parents were homeschooling, and then I read that last year five million households were involved in homeschooling. This is actually a very good thing. You also have alternatives that we ought to push for. When I was president of Landmark Legal Foundation, we paved the way for school choice. School choice is something President Trump embraced. We need to push hard wherever we can for school choice.
I agree, this is a civil rights issue, particularly in our inner cities, but wherever we can have it, we should have it, options to government run schools. There's other things we can do. For instance, and some groups are doing it now, under the 14th amendment of the Constitution, we have what's called the Equal Protection Clause.
Well, if you're teaching children that they're inferior because of their race, and if you're teaching other children to hate other children because of their race, a very strong argument be made that that violates the federal Constitution and the Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause. As I say, we need to learn how to become litigious too. There's other things we can do.
The teacher's union, the NEA and the AFT, they are given special tax status by the Internal Revenue Service. They're not supposed to use union dues for politics. I was told by somebody, the AFT has in their tax return, which is publicly available, which is supposed to be on their website, but you can always get it by writing them and writing the IRS. As a matter of law, they have to provide their tax returns.
I was told the AFT said they spent nothing on politics. All right, they lied. Obviously they spent a lot of money on politics. So let's say you're a local parent, you can collect news articles on what they're doing. You can go to school board meetings and ask them, and you can put together a complaint and it's very easy to do. Again, Dr. Dobson, I have it in the back of the book.
You can link it right up to the IRS on how to file a complaint against these teacher unions. Imagine in a school district, if a hundred parents filed a hundred complaints against the union, they would have to respond to this. You can use the Freedom of Information Act against, and states have them, against any school district, against any school system, demand documents, copies of their contracts. You want to know how teachers are hired. You want to know how teachers are promoted.
Dr. James Dobson: We must do everything we can to protect the younger generation because that's the future of the country. One of my most oft quoted concerns came from Adolf Hitler of all people in 1937. He was commenting on the fact that there was opposition to him and the culture, and he's quoted as saying, "It does not matter what the people think. We've got their kids."
And that's just what keeps me awake at night is they've got our kids. And I've been beating a drum for parents to step in and defend those youngsters who are too young and gullible to question what they're being told. We've got to fight for the kids. And if we don't, we've lost not only the kids, we've lost everything. We've already lost essentially one generation that has departed from what their parents believed and thought, and now we're about to lose the second one and we must not do it.
Mark Levin: And you're right, and when you go back to Karl Marx and Engels, this is what they talk about. This is you've got to destroy the social structure. You've got to destroy the society. You've got to destroy the nuclear family, and you got to destroy and control the educational system.
Dr. James Dobson: Mark, I left the university because of this very concern that I saw the family was in the bullseye. And this was 1977, and I began warning about what I was seeing coming. I don't want to sound like father time here or that I was some kind of prophet, but if you've watched the culture and what was happening, you could see where they wanted to take it. And I had a lot of opposition from within the church and within the Christian community saying, "We're not political. You're too political." They didn't seem to get it. Now, many of them are saying to me, "I heard you. I didn't believe it, but I do now."
Mark Levin: Well, Dr. Dobson, you know this better than, we have very radical liberal elements within these various religious institutions. Whether it's Christianity, whether it's Judaism, they have politicized faith where the real faith is the politics of the left. It's not the Bible. And I see this all the time. It's frustrating as can be.
I'll drive down the road and I'll see "Sermon on Black Lives matter this Sunday" and so forth and so on. Again, we have free will in this country and people should embrace houses of worship that inform the moral views, their ethical views, their views of family, and not just go through the cycle of these institutions because they say, "Oh, look at this. This is a Christian place. This is a Jewish." It doesn't matter. You got to pick your houses of worship very, very carefully.
Your pastors, your ministers, your rabbis, and so forth and so on. You got to pick them very, very carefully. I have now, and it makes a huge difference in your life of course. I'm trying to persuade the people who haven't made up their minds or who are confused. People who are out to destroy my country and destroy my liberty, destroy future generations, I'm not out to persuade them, I'm out to defeat them, so I don't much care what they have to say about me.
Dr. James Dobson: Mark, we are out of time for the first program. If you would be so kind, I would love to have you stay with us in this. I would like to start by talking about Afghanistan and what's happened there, and then we'll get back to your book. Let's close this program with a quote that you included. In fact, it's the end of your first chapter of American Marxism and you quoted Ronald Reagan.
I worked with him for five years and he was an icon for me, and this is a quote from him. He said, and many people have heard this, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
Well, we'll pick up right here next time. Actually, if you'll just stay where you are, we'll continue recording and let our listeners here it next time. Thank you so much for being with us and for all that you do and especially for writing this incredible book, American Marxism.
Mark Levin: My great pleasure. Thank you, sir.
Roger Marsh: Well, that was Dr. James Dobson today here on Family Talk, joined by his friend and guest Mark Levin. They discussed some of the topics in Mark's best-selling book entitled American Marxism. America truly is a unique country. It was built upon Judeo-Christian values and biblical principles that shaped it and allowed it to thrive to this day.
But now the tides are changing and threats to liberty and freedom are common. They're even celebrated. We need to stand up for those rights and values to protect future generations indeed. Be sure to join us again tomorrow for part two of this important conversation here on Family Talk. If you're a parent, you have a huge responsibility in raising your children to be equipped to take on the world as they grow older and become adults.
Seems that everywhere you turn, there is an ungodly agenda being pushed on kids, and that begins at the earliest of ages. Now to help walk alongside you and better provide you with timeless biblically based advice and tools, Dr. Dobson has prepared a special bundle for you. He's bundled up his books, Bringing Up Boys and Bringing Up Girls together, and we'll be happy to send you that bundle as our way of thanking you for your gift of any amount in support of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute today.
So reserve your bundle when you click the link on the broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org/family talk. Remember that Family Talk is a listener supported Christian radio outreach, and it's because of you and your prayers and faithful financial support that we are able to continue to bring quality content to you and your family each and every day.
If you'd like to learn more about how to support the JDFI just go to drjamesdobson.org. And if you're looking for a particular resource or if you'd like to reach out with a prayer concern, just call us at 877-732-6825. I'm Roger Marsh. Be sure to join us again next time here on Family Talk when Dr. Dobson continues his conversation with author Mark Levin. Till then, may God continue to richly bless you and your family as you grow deeper in relationship with Him. You've been listening to Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.
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