The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 16 – Paul Kengor

Episode 16: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

This extensive conversation with Dr. Paul Kengor explores the dangerous nature of Marxist ideology through the lens of its founder, Karl Marx, revealing him to be not just a flawed economist but a fundamentally evil individual whose personal character directly influenced his destructive philosophy. Dr. Kengor, author of The Devil and Karl Marx, demonstrates Marx’s hypocrisy and explains how his personal evil manifested in an ideology focused on ruthless criticism of everything that exists and abolition rather than building up.

The conversation emphasizes that Marxism represents a spiritual battle, not merely an economic theory, and has historically produced mansion Marxists and champagne socialists who live luxuriously while imposing hardship on others. Dr. Kengor warns young people that this worldview seeks total revolutionary transformation of foundational order and urges them to understand they’re facing opposition regardless of their stance, so they should stand courageously for truth with conviction, compassion, and humor.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:00):
Hey parents, we’re going to be talking about the Marxist worldview in this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. And some of the things that we get into can be disturbing for younger children. So I just want you to be aware of that. If you’ve got children in the room that we’re going to talk about the tough stuff we’re not going to hold back, but you might want to be thoughtful about what they hear.

Hey everyone. It’s Dr. Jeff. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence showing how our worldview changes everything. Now, we’ve talked about the Marxist worldview on this show, an ideology that resulted in the deaths of potentially hundreds of millions of people. But today, our guest gives us insight into Karl Marx, the man who once wrote, “My soul once true to God is chosen for hell.” Chilling words. Please welcome to the show, Dr. Paul Kengor. Dr. Paul Kengor, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. Paul Kengor (01:04):
Thank you, Jeff. Great to be with you. And I really respect you and everything that you guys do. You’ve done the Lord’s work for so long, and I know you’re continuing to do the Lord’s work, so it’s great to be with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (01:16):
Well, I’m really excited about our conversation. The first thing I remember reading from you was your book, Dups, which tells how the most intelligent quote unquote people in America got sucked into believing the Soviet Union and communism were awesome. And remember, everybody knows the Lincoln Stephens quote. I’ve seen the future and it works. But the top intellectual leaders of our time got sucked into all of this. And now, I mean, just to dive right into it, we’ve got a whole new generation that is being seduced by the false promises of Marxism and the related ideas of socialism and communism. What on earth is going on?

Dr. Paul Kengor (01:57):
Yeah, it’s crazy. And you’re right, the Lincoln Stephens quote, “I am a Patriot for Russia.” How about the Langston Hughes quote, “Put one more S in the USA to make it the USSA when we take over.” And I know a lot of people today, for a lot of young people today, I think Langston Hughes has become almost mandatory reading, required reading in a lot of public schools. And in many ways on civil rights issues, he’s good. So are people like Paul Robeson, but Robeson was pro- Stalin. I mean, literally pro-Stalin.

And Langston Hughes wrote the poem, Goodbye Christ, Lord Jehovah. Move on over, make way for some guy named Marx, some guy named Lennon, some guy named Worker, some guy named me. So yeah, a lot of these intellectuals were seduced by that. Political pilgrims, Paul Hollander called them. I call them Patemkin Progressives in my book, Dupes.

(02:53):
And it’s kind of a long tradition. Margaret Sanger, Margaret Sanger’s boyfriend, H.G. Wells. I mean, that was her boyfriend while she was married. George Bernard Shaw. Some of these people made incredible statements about the Soviet Union. And today, you don’t have people in the West so much making statements about the Soviet Union, but you have them making really ridiculous statements about communism, Marxism, socialism. So in a way, the duping here continues.

And with people today, the main problem is three words: education, education, education. They’re not learning what they should have learned about these ideologies, about history. And it’s one of the reasons why ministries and outreaches like yours are so important. The worldview training and kind of remedial education, teaching kids what they really ought to be knowing, especially in a country like America that fought the good fight against communism won the Cold War.

(03:53):
And yet here we are over 30 years later. I was a senior in college when the Berlin Wall fell. And I thought, Jeff, you and I are almost the exact same age. We thought that it was over, right? We won. And now everybody knew that communism was bad. And here we are 30 years later and you’ve got stunning percentages of people, not just young people, but across the board, saying things like communist manifesto is a pretty good idea. I support the abolition of private property, saying that they prefer socialism over capitalism, praising what they call democratic socialism. So people are really confused and it’s a mess.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:35):
We’re going to get into all of that in this show. And I love the format of our show because we get to spend 30, 40 minutes really digging into things. But Paul, I want to mention to everybody, I love your new book, The Devil and Karl Marx. And you actually make the case in this book that Karl Marx wasn’t just a bad economist. He was actually an evil guy. And I want to get into all of that because why is it important to understand that he was evil and what effect did that have on the ideology that he put forward that’s still afflicting us to this day?

But before we get into all that, I want our audience to get to know you a little bit. So you’re a professor at Grove City College, which is one of my favorite schools, and you teach political science there. And you’re a New York Times bestselling author. But here’s the secret that I don’t think very many people know. You almost didn’t graduate from high school. You hated education, right?

Dr. Paul Kengor (05:35):
Well, I was a bad kid. I mean, I was really rotten. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I just wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, Jeff, and think, “Oh man, I forgot about that. I did that too.” And many moments like that, somebody told me one time, “You should write a St. Augustine’s Confessions kind of thing.”

And I said, “Well, kind of like not any way to compare myself to Augustine,” but there’s a point in there where Augustine says something to the effect of, “There’s so many other things that I can’t even say.” And that’s how I would feel. It’s like, which sin should I start with? Which should I finish with? And I recently checked my, I think it was my final semester in high school. I believe I had five Ds and a C or something like that.

(06:28):
Yeah, I was a terrible student. I didn’t take classes seriously. I didn’t care about classes. I didn’t care about anything academic. I just cared about partying and having a good time. And it really changed, Jeff, when we kind of sort of knocked down drag out with my dad in the kitchen where he, instead of us yelling at each other, he got tears in his eyes and got choked up and told me that he just wanted me to have the opportunity that he never had, which is why he was working so hard and he just wanted me to go to college.

And I remember that night going out with my burnout friends and I was a burnout among them and just saying, “Man, I’ve got to go to college. I’ve got to go to college.” And they said, “Why, dude?” I said, “For my dad, I just have to do it.”

(07:15):
I have to do it. So I went to the only place that would accept me at community college. And that first semester, I tried a little bit and I got about halfway through. See, I always had the aptitude, right? The ability. I got about halfway through, I got a midterm grade report and I had almost all A’s. And I thought, wow, what would happen here if I really tried, right? If I really tried.

And I did, I think I finished that semester with something like five A’s and a B. I made the president’s list and then I could talk about this for an hour, but a teacher and a health class, it was called health, gave me some positive reinforcement on a paper that I wrote on the subject of cancer, Jeff, on the subject of cancer and something that you’ve struggled with. And I did a paper on that.

(08:08):
She was very impressed. She gave me positive feedback. And all of a sudden, I just did a 180. I just did a complete 180. And by my second year at the community college, I was pre-med. I suddenly wanted to go to medical school. I still hadn’t totally left my lifestyle, chasing girls and drinking beer and doing all that other stuff, but the change started then. And then pretty soon I became obsessed in the other direction.

Theresa Avila said, “You can either be somebody who does great evil or great good.” Some people are inclined to one of two extremes. So I suddenly became really super focused on medical school of all things, medical school. And I applied to the University of Pittsburgh, which had the world’s number one organ transplant team. It’s like an hour for me. I was born in Pittsburgh and I got accepted.

(09:10):
They conditionally accepted me because my grades had been so awful in high school. I had to earn 21 credits, college of general studies, 2.5 grade point average, something like that, which I did. And also I got there the first week I got there. So Jeff, I’m taking courses like physics and calculus for the first time in my life, which made it even more difficult. And I went to the student union to the employment board and enlisted all these different campus jobs. In those days, none of this was online. This would have been 86, 87.

And I looked up there and it said job with children’s hospital, Presbyterian University Hospital, fall clinic, organ transplant team, transporting organs. This was in June. I started in the summertime and I looked at that and I thought, “Oh man, I’ve got to apply for that. I have to apply for that.”

(10:00):
But if I get a job like that, I mean, there’s no way I’ll make it through this program because I’ve never had any of these courses before. And I applied, I got called, I got an interview, I got the job right away. And I worked for Dr. Thomas Starzel, who was the transplant pioneer. And we did 80, 90% of the world’s organ transplants at the University of Pittsburgh. We trained the world surgeons in organ transplantation.

So I did that for the next three or four years and suddenly I was Mr. Academic, Mr. Serious. And that became, this is a whole other conversation, but then it became a battle between, I became very interested in international affairs, end of the Cold War, communism, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pope John Paul II that whole Cold War group that was going on. Started writing for my campus newspaper.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:49):
I’ve got to ask you a question about that, Paul.That’s a major switch to flip. It is. To go from pre-med, interest in organ transplant, to international. Was there something in the news that happened or what exactly turned your attention in that direction?

Dr. Paul Kengor (11:09):
Well, it’s a great question. So yeah, the 1988 presidential election, but most important, there was the collapse of communism, which relates to this whole conversation we’re having now. 88, 89, 90, and the international events were just all around us dominating the news. I became very interested in it. I had conversations with people on campus and I had arguments with these people who I didn’t know what a liberal or conservative was yet at that point, but they were liberals basically.

And they weren’t giving Ronald Reagan any credit. I knew enough about the news to know that Reagan had predicted some of this stuff, the evil empire speech, SDI said communism would end up in the ash heap of history. I knew the liberals had made fun of him when he said that stuff. “Oh, that ain’t never going to happen.” And then it was all happening and then all of a sudden the idiot that they called him, they said he was an idiot.

(12:00):
Now he wasn’t an idiot anymore, but he wasn’t right or they couldn’t give him credit. So I wrote, it’s a long story, but I wrote a letter to the editor of the student newspaper, The Pitt News, which published four days a week. The editor said,” This is a really good piece. I’d actually like to publish this as an article. “And it was a piece defending Ronald Reagan on the homeless issue. Liberals were accusing Reagan of homelessness. They blamed him for the homeless. They blamed him for AIDS. They blamed him for everything.

Dr. Jeff Myers (12:30):
I remember that. I remember those conversations in class just going round and round about that.

Dr. Paul Kengor (12:34):
Crazy, crazy. So they published this article in the newspaper and I got called a hater, a racist. The next piece I did was on arming the Contras in Iran. For that, I got called a Nazi, I got called a fascist. I mean, the left has been doing this forever. This isn’t new. The only difference now is that they’ve got social media and they can form Twitter mobs and they can really go after you. But in those days, I mean, they called you the worst names you could imagine just simply for disagreeing with them.

I remember my dad picking me up and bringing me home on a Friday. I said, “Hey, how’s that newspaper column thing going that you’re doing?” I said, “Oh, pretty good, dad. Pretty good. I got called a Nazi and a fascist.” And he said, “A what?” And I said, “A Nazi, a fascist.”

(13:27):
He said, “A Nazi fascist?” I said, “Yeah, yeah.” He said, “What are you writing about, Hitler?” I said, “Writing about Hitler? And if I was writing about Hitler, would it be positive?” And he said, “Well, why would anyone call you a Nazi or a fascist?” He said, “I just wrote a piece on defending, arming the Contras in Nicaragua.”

I said, “Dad, there’s these people on campus that are called liberals. And if you disagree with them, they absolutely trash you. They call you every name in the book. I’ve never seen anything like it.” And instead of Jeff, and I think it says a lot about where I am now, instead of kind of crawling under a rock, we’re in a fetal position and saying, “Oh, I don’t like being called names.” I said, “I’m going to write more if you guys are going to do this.”

(14:10):
And I did, and then I ended up being the editorial page editor. We published four days a week, Monday through Thursday. I became the campus conservative, and pretty soon I was, 89 to 90 was the year that I did that, probably 88 too. And I was writing on all these different events. All of a sudden, I’m reading everything on politics, all the national reviews, the New Republic, the American Spectator in New York Times, all these different publications.

And so here I am, I’m this guy working for the transplant team, going from patients, room to room, writing on their wall charts, writing data on their wall charts, talking to patients. And on the other hand, I’m really, really into international events and international politics. So I had this moment where I’m being tugged in two different directions. I thought, what am I supposed to do?

(14:56):
What am I supposed to do? Making it even harder, I was agnostic at that point, if not an atheist. But it’s funny, I would find myself walking into glorious St. Paul’s Cathedral in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh on my way home to my apartment on North Craig Street and stopping in this church and just trying to pray and saying, “If you’re really there, if you really exist, tell me, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do with my life? What do you want me to do?”

And it was frustrating that I didn’t get any resounding noise from the top of the ceiling of the chapel or any kind of sign, but this is the kind of discernment thing that everybody sort of has to go through and try to figure out as they’re trying to figure out what their vocation is, what their calling is.

(15:51):
So ultimately I decided not to go to medical school, number of different reasons for that, and instead go into graduate work. I went to American University in Washington, the School of International Service, got my master’s degree, worked for a number of think tanks, Center for Strategic and International Studies, started publishing articles, started writing for publications, and that took me on the path to where I ended up.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:17):
There’s so much to this story, but there’s a point that’s coming through that helps me so much with the young adults that I have the privilege of working with and that is that you doubled down. Once you got used to the fact that you’re going to be called names and you realize my opponents have like a four or five word vocabulary and that is it. And if I can handle that, then I can be strong. So you were kind of being canceled before cancel culture was cool, right?

Dr. Paul Kengor (16:49):
Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, it’s ironic. We were having this conversation just a few weeks ago. I was going through some old boxes to look for something and maybe it was when I saw that transcript and I came across the binder of the articles that I wrote for the Pit News.

And my final farewell column said something like, “Conservative columnist says goodbye to some unthoughtful words.” And it was all the words that you could get called if you disagreed with liberals: fascist, Nazi, hater, racist, homophobe, homophobe was one of them. And so yeah, they were doing that back then. And my response to it was, “Look, stand for the truth, try to be kind and decent and charitable to people.” That’s always been my motto. Try to be funny.

(17:38):
One of my good friends, Bob Terrell, the founder of the American Spectator, I’m a senior editor there. By the way, I write columns for American Spectators. If you want my regular columns, I have a weekly column there. But Terrell has excelled at this, kind of being funny in your writing, right? Try to be winsome, try to be, don’t attack people. I mean, you can go after the president or somebody like that, right? But if it’s somebody who’s not a really public figure, don’t trash people, don’t vilify people, go after ideas, right?

And even with Karl Marx, right? I try to attack Marx’s ideas rather than Mark’s the person. Though at the same time, I do highlight the really bad things about Marx as a person that I think reflect his ideas and things about Marx so we should know. I mean, people like Patrice Cullers, the founder of Black Lives Matter, she needs to know what a racist Marx was.

(18:34):
I mean, there’s some ugly, ugly, ugly, ugly stuff the man said about black people. But my approach has been to try to be charitable, try to be good to people, try to be kind, try to be funny if I can, but don’t back down, be not afraid. And listen, this is for young people to understand too. No matter what position you take, all right, you’re going to anger somebody. That’s right.

Now I found with a lot of people that kind of end up on the left, it’s because I think they go over to the other side because the left is more vicious than conservatives. They are. They are. And I know there are exceptions to this, but your typical Christian conservative is, I’ve read the emails. You could look at the letters, the four letter words, and I know there’s exceptions to this, but the people on the left are really brutal.

(19:27):
They’re really brutal. They won’t even go to you and ask you in the spirit of Matthew, right? “Hey, could you explain this first? I think I’m having problems with something you’re saying. “I mean, they’ll go straight to the press, they’ll go straight to Twitter, they’ll go straight to a petition to the president of the college. They can be really nasty if they disagree with you. So for young people listening though, you’re going to get opposition either way. So you might as well stand for what you believe, what hopefully is the truth. And as Christians, what we believe is the truth according to the Christian gospel.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:59):
Yeah. Man, that’s such a good word. I think there are so many young adults that we work with who just feel this sense of fear. It’s the shame and guilt culture. They feel ashamed of what they believe at sort of a deep psychological level. And so they aren’t prepared to stand for truth because they might get called names. But the point you’re making is you’re going to get called names just by believing what you believe. So believe it with conviction, believe it with compassion and have a good sense of humor about it.

Dr. Paul Kengor (20:38):
Well, that’s right. Have fun with it. And also too, look at any given time just in the news, who’s being vilified and who’s being attacked. It really happens to everybody sooner or later. And it’s just kind of the way it is. And I mean, if you want to stand before your Maker someday and say, “Well, I would have stood for the truth.”

Imagine that moment where that playback moment, okay, remember when this happened and you denied me or you didn’t stand up for life in this moment when the professor in the room said, “There’s nobody in here who’s actually pro-life, is there?” And 500 people sat on their hands and you’re sitting there thinking, “I should put my hand up right now,” but you didn’t do it. At that moment, you said, “Well, Jesus, I didn’t want to be called a hater on Twitter.”

(21:37):
I’d be standing next to some early Christian martyr who was eaten by lions in the Coliseum, right? “Oh, we’ll meet Felicity or Perpetua here who was eaten by lions for the faith.” And you were afraid to be what, called a hater by some 18 year old twit on Twitter, some fascist?

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:00):
And a Twitter post that would last for one week and then gone.

Dr. Paul Kengor (22:01):
Exactly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:02):
Exactly. Yeah.

Dr. Paul Kengor (22:04):
Yeah. And when it’s happening, it seems hard, but it goes away. And I found this too, that when you stand on your principle and you say, and I’ve met people say, “Don’t ever say you’re sorry.” I say I’m sorry all the time if I was wrong. I apologize all the time if I was wrong, but if I wasn’t wrong and I didn’t get it.

I’ll stop and say, “Well, I’m sorry, but this is what I believe. I mean, my faith teaches and I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. I believe that God made us male and female.” And when you say that, they will often back off because they say, “Okay, this is somebody we can’t bully and force to capitulate and grovel.” So they move on to somebody who will capitulate and grovel.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:50):
Yeah. Man, I want to go back to a comment that you made a few minutes ago. You talked about, there are some nasty conservatives, but this is mostly a thing of the left. I remember reading Victor Sebastian’s book on Lenin and he talked about this. He said Lenin sort of mastered the art of public shaming and name calling, and that it has become part of the leftist viewpoint from that point on. But I want to get back to your book because I want people to be, by the end of our show, think, “I need to get that book.”

(23:26):
The Devil and Karl Marx, you talked about the nastiness of this guy. And I’d like for you to just go over that a little bit because I think people need to understand that this was not a man who was this wonderful champion of the underprivileged and so forth, but he was nasty from start to finish and nasty ideas come out of people who are like that. I know we don’t have a lot of time, but yeah, just dive in.

Dr. Paul Kengor (23:59):
Sure. His public life was an extension of his private life. I mean, the family nurse made Lenchen who he wouldn’t pay a penny to and Lenchen was lent to the family by Marx’s wife, Jenny’s mother. In fact, Lenchen grew up with Jenny in the same household. They were like sisters. And because Karl, as both his mother said and as his wife said, they expressed the wish that Karl would earn some capital rather than just write about capital. He refused to work.

I mean, what he was looking for was a state that would take care of him all the time, right? He refused to work. The only way that he got along was by sucking money from Ingles, from Ingles and Ingles’ father’s inheritance. Marx got as much money as he could from his own parents. And then once his father died, he went to visit his mom and the only thing he could get from her that he bragged to his wife, Jenny, was at least he got the old lady to rip up some IOUs, right?

(24:59):
But Lenchen was lent to the family and Marx refused to pay her a penny. And in fact, Marx got her pregnant behind Marx’s wife’s back. And then when that child was born, Marx refused to accept paternity to acknowledge that the kid was his, and of course, refused to ever pay a penny of child support. So this sort of champion of the working class.

And what I’m describing here, Jeff, as you know so well in the different books that Summit Ministries has done, David Noble’s books and so forth, I mean, these Marxists, all of these Marxist leaders, it’s hard to find an exception to this. They are mansion Marxists. They are champagne socialists. They’re limousine leftists. Fidel Castro, when he died, was one of the 10 wealthiest leaders in the world, according to Forbes Magazine. Wow. Lennon, Stalin, Dotcha’s on the Black Sea for all the different Soviet leaders, Nikolai Chaucesku in Romania.

(25:59):
Far and away, the most wealthy person in all of North Korea is always, whichever Kim is in charge, they live like kings. I mean, you could go on and on and on and on. People were really upset. I mentioned Patrice Cullers earlier, Black Lives Matter when it was learned that she’s bought like four houses in the last four years or something like that with money that she’s earned from her income running BLM, which has really angered fellow BLM leaders. In fact, the head of BLM in New York has called for an investigation into her personal finances.

And I immediately got emails from people saying, “Look at this. Look at this. Do you believe us?” I said, “Well, yeah.” I mean, all of these Marxist leaders always do this. They always do this. So while people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are talking about limiting if not ending air travel, right?

(26:49):
They’re not going to stop flying. I mean, rail travel will be for the masses, right? Not for the masters. It’ll be for the ruled, not the rulers, right? So exemptions are always made. So socialists never live by the rules of socialism themselves. Marxists never lived by the rules of Marxisms. And this is something that Marx himself established very early on from day one.

Dr. Jeff Myers (27:18):
And he seemed to be, and this is, I remember I was actually on a flight when I was reading your book and I kept saying to my wife, Stephanie, who was with me, “You’ve got to hear this. You’ve got to hear this.” He was actually given over to evil. Tell us more about that.

Dr. Paul Kengor (27:35):
Yeah. Well, I mean, he wrote poems about the devil. And in fact, that’s what I focus in particular on in the book. I think the lead poem that I use, “Thus, heaven I forfeited. I know it full well. My soul once true to God is chosen for hell.” That’s Marx, The Pale Maid in 1837. And I find that one.

So look, in a lot of cases, you could say a poet or a writer is writing, right? But in Marx’s case, I think a lot of this you can argue is autobiographical and his soul was once true to God. I would never say that his soul was chosen for hell, but he rejects that, right? He forfeited it. Another one, this is his poem, The Player, 1841. “Look now, my blood dark sword shall stab unerringly within my soul. The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.”

(28:41):
“See the sword, the prince of darkness sold it to me. For he beats the time and gives the signs ever more boldly, I play the dance of death.” Those are just a couple of examples, as you know. I mean, I go on a great length with phrases people used in describing him. I mean, Ingels wrote this weird poem referred to Marx as the monster of 10,000 devils, described him as the black man from trier, trier Germany. And black man being like in the translation, like darkened figure, like forboding presence in that sense.

And I say in the book, I don’t try to make the argument that Marx was possessed or a Satanist or anything like that, but others have said that. Pastor Richard Warnbrun made that allegation and Robert Payne, probably the best Marxist biographer ever said that it did seem that there were times that Marx believed that he was doing the work of the devil and pain doesn’t hold back at all. There’s some really chilling stuff in Marx’s writings.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:54):
Well, and you look at the consequences and some of the things that Pastor Richard Warnbrand went through, Things that he wrote, like being forced to have human excrement as a communion. Things that are extraordinarily evil, so evil that you can hardly even describe them in words. So there is this aspect of this worldview that is that the darkness of it has never even fully been plumbed.

Dr. Paul Kengor (30:24):
I say this in the beginning of the book. The book probably should more accurately be called the devil in communism or the devil in Marxism. Although Marx is the figure that I focus on more than any other. And it is like a spiritual biography of Marx for at least a hundred pages. So most of the time is spent on Marx. But I go to Lenin, Marx, the Petestee prison in Romania, which is what Warn Bron talked about.

And there they actually did black masses. They actually took pastors and they tied them to crosses. And they had prisoners go up to them, urinate on them, defecate on them. And then they had the pastors get up and take the human excrement and form it into communion wafers and take urine and put it in a cup and consecrate this. It was horrible stuff, referred to Christ as the great idiot crucified, referred to his mother as the great whore, horrible stuff.

(31:27):
And Warnbrand wasn’t even in Petestee. He knew people that were there. Where Warm Braun was, he said that he had communist guards chanting at him, “We are the devil. We are the devil.” And he said, “All the descriptions of hell and Dante’s inferno cannot match what it’s like to be tortured in a communist prison.” So that’s the kind of thing that actually went on. I mean, this was genuinely very evil.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:59):
Well, I mean, what we’re hearing in the time that we’ve had, and I want to draw this to a close and get you to give your thoughts about what the rising generation should do, but that this is a worldview that is full of hypocrisy and that historically there is a dark side to a Marxist worldview that a lot of people are ignoring. But what do you do? If you’re an 18 to 29 year old, what do you do?

Dr. Paul Kengor (32:25):
Yeah. First of all, it’s a spiritual battle. So I want people to understand that. It isn’t just that Marxism, communism doesn’t work because it’s say, as Michael Knowles says in the preface to this book, because it distorts markets. As Ronald Reagan said, as our pastors have said, this is an evil on the spiritual order, not just on the economic order. I quote Karl Marx, people said that he was asked, did Marx have a favorite quote, a favorite line? And if they asked me or you, Jeff, we might cite a New Testament verse.

I wrote a bunch of biographies of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan would’ve said, “Oh yeah, Isaiah, let’s see. John, I’ve got two favorites in John. I’ve got a favorite from Isaiah.” Oh, and also kind of a secular thing. I keep on my desk from Sacramento when I was governor of California to president of the United States, a little plaque that says there’s no limit to how much a man can achieve if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit. Nice statements like this.

(33:29):
Marx had a favorite. It was a line from Goethe’s Faust, the Faustian bargain, and it was from the Mephistopheles character, the demon character. And that line is, “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” That was Marx’s favorite. Everything that exists deserves to perish. I mean, this is a view, this is a totalitarian worldview. Marxism wasn’t about building up. It was about razing, R-A-Z-E. This was about razing the foundation, bringing it down.

Fundamentally, as Marx put it in a letter to Arnold Rouge, 1843, called for the ruthless criticism of everything that exists. Marx was about criticize, criticize, criticize, abolition, abolition, abolition. He said in his essay, the opiate of the masses essay, he used the word abolition 29 times. He said, “The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.” So I want people to understand that this isn’t just an economic theory that we’re talking about.

(34:30):
If you think Marxism is about, as some young people have told people in surveys, sharing, being kind to one another, spreading the wealth, you don’t understand Marxism. Read the communist manifesto, read some of these other books. It’s difficult to find a more revolutionary philosophy that so totally wants to reinvent the fundamental foundational order.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:55):
Wow. Man, this has been a wake-up call. Thank you, Paul. I really appreciate your time. The book is The Devil and Karl Marx, and there are other books that Dr. Kengor has written on this topic. Man, thank you. Thank you for your investment of time, and thanks for bringing the truth to light here.

Dr. Paul Kengor (35:14):
Well, thanks, Jeff, and thanks for everybody in your ministry. I pray for all the kids that attend this summer and here on out. And if you guys pray for me too, I need it.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:26):
Yeah. Yeah, we will. I mean, I can see that you’re in the battle. You’re right in there. Okay.

Dr. Paul Kengor (35:31):
Yeah, amen.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:32):
All right. Our hearts, our thoughts, our prayers are with you. Thanks, brother.

Dr. Paul Kengor (35:35):
Thank you, sir.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:37):
Thank you for joining us today on The Dr. Jeff Show. And a special thank you to my friend, Dr. Paul Kengor. You can pick up his book, The Devil and Karl Marx. The subtitle is Communism’s Long March of Death: Deception and Infiltration, wherever books are sold.

Ryan Dobson (35:57):
Hi, everyone. I’m Ryan Dobson from the Rebel Parenting Podcast. When my parents, Jim and Shirley Dobson sent me to the Summit Ministries Worldview Conference when I was 17, we had no idea the impact it would have on my life. It changed me so much in two short weeks. I’ve returned every summer for 34 years. This summer, your student can attend an in-person conference. That’s right, in person.

Summit Ministry’s Worldview Conference challenges students ages 16 to 24 to think deeper about their convictions and their faith by engaging with today’s top worldview thinkers and apologists. Can you imagine in person with other students learning about the Christian worldview? If not, they can attend Summit’s virtual experience and it’s amazing. Change your student’s life forever by partnering with Summit Ministry’s Worldview Conference today. Find out more by clicking the link in the show notes.