My guest today is going to help us address that concern. He's Mark Levin. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Temple University's 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, and 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 bestselling 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's all mine. As I told you off here and I want your audience to know how crucially important you've been to this country and 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 so more than 600,000 copies in a short period of time. It's probably more than that. How many has it sold now?
Mark Levin: As of today over 900,000.
Dr. James Dobson: Unbelievable. That's what we call a runaway bestseller. 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 loved 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. Even our children in kindergarten and elementary school, the colleges and campuses are a runaway disaster. The borders are wide open unintentionally 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.
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 applied to American society. 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 of the things but some of the things we should absolutely do to take it on. I think people are looking for answers, practical, hands-on, commonsense answers to try and get their country back.
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've got to have your thinking cap on, on what's going on in this country.
Dr. James Dobson: You know Mark, I left academia. I was at USC School of Medicine and I left there because I saw coming what we're experiencing now. 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 is utterly corrupt. Academia is utterly corrupt. 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.
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 Sunday night dinner or some social event and then think that's actually accomplished something.
Our enemies, and I don't call them adversaries and 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.
When you look at these various revolutions, Dr. Dobson, all over the world, these tyrannical, totalitarian revolutions, these communist revolutions, when you look at what's going on in Afghanistan and so forth, that's a relatively small percentage of the population that achieves these revolutions. Even our own American Revolution, there's about a third of the population that actually supported it.
But when you look at how Lenin came to power with about 20% of the population, Mao with about 20, 25% of the population, Castro with even less than that. You look what happened in Iran, what I call the Islamo-Nazi regime there and others, 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 this 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 acquiesced 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 mankind, it's filled with evil. It's filled with totalitarian societies of 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 we the people are resolute on ensuring that it will. 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 XYZ. But there are things we can do just from our computers and in talking to our neighbors, in the way we raise our children, in what our children read and what they take to colleges and universities. There are things we've got to do. We've got to engage.
You see it happening here and there, Dr. Dobson, but it needs to happen on a more widespread national basis. It would be nice if we could network one community to the next as the hard left does and share our ideas and so forth, because we have to push back.
Dr. James Dobson: Talk about the state university system. What is going on there? Many people have a vague notion of what happens there and yet they send their kids there.
Mark Levin: Yup.
Dr. James Dobson: What is your take on it?
Mark Levin: People want to, a lot of them, want to send their kids to Ivy League Schools. They 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. 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.
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. I wrote another book about this called Plunder and Deceit, and I go deeply into how these professors are chosen.
What happens is the faculty chooses the faculty and the faculty chooses the deans. 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. 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. 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, divestment 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 and 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. 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 a 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. 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 Maoist, they should go to the administration and demand their tuition back.
If they can't get the tuition back, they should 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 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. It starts in kindergarten in its own way. How in the world can we wrest 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. You have parents who may not be public school teachers but are professionals who have very good backgrounds in a whole variety of areas, or parents who aren't professionals but are quite capable of reading the curriculum that the kids need to be taught. That is growing. I read something in 1973, some small number of parents were homeschooling. Then I read that last year 5 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 can be made that that violates the Federal Constitution and the Civil War Amendments, including the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause. As I said, 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're lying. Obviously they spend 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 100 parents filed 100 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 in the culture, and he's quoted as saying, "It does not matter what the people think. We've got their kids."
That's what keeps me awake at night, is they've got our kids, and I've been beating the 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 in and thought. Now we're about to lose the second one and we must not do it.
Mark Levin: You're right, and when you go back to Karl Marx and Engels, this is what they talk about. 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. I saw the family was in the bullseye, and this was 1977. 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 you know, Dr. Dobson, you know this but we have very radical, liberal elements within these various religious institutions. Whether it's Christianity, whether it's Judaism, they have politicized faith where their real faith is the politics of the left. It's not the Bible.
Dr. James Dobson: Yeah.
Mark Levin: I see this all the time. It's frustrating as can be. I'll drive down the road and I'll see a 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 their 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've got to pick your houses of worship, very, very carefully, your pastors, your ministers, your rabbis and so forth. You've 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. I don't 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.
Well, 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 hear 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 with his friend and our guest on today's broadcast, Mark Levin. They are obviously very concerned about the increasing influence that Marxism is having on our nation, not to mention the favor and acceptability it seems to be gaining from many US citizens as well.
America is a unique place. It was built upon Judeo-Christian values and biblical principles that have allowed it to thrive to this day. But now the tides are changing, and threats to liberty and freedom are common and even celebrated.
If you'd like to learn more about Mark Levin, his radio and television programs or his book, American Marxism, you can visit our broadcast page at drjamesdobson.org/broadcast. That's drjamesdobson.org/broadcast, or you can always give us a call at (877) 732-6825.
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