Role at the Heritage Foundation and Focus on Domestic Policy 

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, thank you very much for being here, first of all, and for interviewing me. I am Mike Gonzalez. I’m the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation. I’ve been here for 14 years. I still write a lot about foreign policy. I was at the State Department before I came here. And I’m in the Foreign Policy Center. However, for the last four or five years or so, I have devoted a lot of my attention to domestic policy. And the reason for that is that it dawned on me towards the end of the last decade, maybe in ’18 or ’17-’18, definitely by ’19, that our biggest threats were coming from inside, were domestic. I remember having donuts with my daughter after Mass one Sunday, maybe about a year ago, maybe about a year and a half ago. She hadn’t left for college yet. And she said, “We will get it, daddy. You were much more comfortable fighting our enemies when they were Russians, or Chinese, or Cuban, or Iranian. And now you have discovered that we have enemies inside the United States, but you are very respectful of the constitutional rights.”

So I think that it was like, wow, she really has thought through this because I hadn’t even thought about this. So that’s the reason why I have been devoting. Definitely with BLM, I saw their rise in 2013. And definitely what happened after the George Floyd summer of 2020, and I saw clearly what they had done and why they were doing it. And I saw how the country as a whole were misreading the situation. I thought that I had to jump in and clarify it.

Escape from Castro, Cuba’s Cultural Genocide, Next Generation Marxism 

Mike Gonzalez:

Yeah, escape is actually the right word for it. I was watching Argo with my two sons the other night. And the scene at the airport when they’re escaping Te Harran reminded me a lot of when I left Cuba with my mother and my sister at the age of 12. It was a harrowing experience. Cuba really is a devil’s island of communism. It was a great place, had its problems of course. Both of my parents fought against Batista, not with guns, but they supported the struggle against Batista. My grandfather was more of an activist against Batista. In fact, my grandfather had to leave the house several times because Batista would send the police to my house to get them. But Batista was a kitten compared to the 60-year dictatorship by the Castros, which is communism, which has eviscerated Cuba’s culture.

It was really cultural genocide what happened in Cuba. The Cuba that my ancestors built, that my family enjoyed is gone. There’s an island called Cuba, but that Cuban culture is no longer existent and never will be again. And I think people ask me, “Well, your experiences in Cuba must guide what you do today.” And they do. And I’m going to explain now how they do it. But I don’t want to give a short shift to the other experiences I’ve had. I’ve lived overseas for 15 years as an American foreign correspondent. I’ve lived under fascism and communism, under military dictatorship, under populous governments, under democracies of different shades and hues. And that has also greatly informed my thinking. But I think that with Cuba, is the cultural genocide. And that I believe is what BLM and the other next gen Marxist, and that’s the title of my next book with Catherine Gorka. The next generation Marxists are trying to really have a cultural genocide in this country. And having seen it, I want to make sure that I do everything I can to stop them.

What kind of worldview were you born into? 

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, very Christian, very Catholic. I was an altar boy as a young man in the church, the corner church that my great-grandparents had helped build. I was every room in the house. I grew up in a house where four generations of my family had lived, had pictures of saints. A lot of Michaels. I’m Michael, my father was Miguel. I’m the fourth. No, I’m the fifth. My son is the sixth in line. So there were portraits of holy heart, sacred heart, portraits of the Virgin. And we were very much informed by a Catholic attitude as I was growing up. We were also fervently pro-capitalist. We believed in the free market. The only economy that functioned on the island of Cuba when I was growing up was the black market.

The communism takes away the price discovery mechanism, which is the reason why it always ends in tears. It never produces bread, only bread lines because the incentive to produce is gone. However, in the black market where people were exchanging things, that was except that it was illegal, of course. So at the young age of six or seven, I had to stay in guard in front of my house, make sure the local communist committee, which was on every block, did not come in. Or at least I could shout to my father because my father’s in the back exchanging his cigars for milk for me and my sister. He forwent smoking his cigars so he could exchange them for the equivalent, I guess, the market. Whatever the equivalence was that the market discovered for cigars and milk. That was what my father was doing.

And a great appreciation of our situation in the Caribbean, that was a very different worldview than the one we have today. Very, very deep understanding of our Spanish culture. My other set of grandparents were Spanish, so we ate Spanish delicacies at Christmas. But when we could buy them in the black market or they were exported from Spain, that was really… So it’s very different from the American worldview, which I now have because I’ve spent the last half century here. But that was really the worldview that I think old Cuba had.

Education and Beginning of Career 

Mike Gonzalez:

So I graduated from Columbia, December ’94. I started working for the Wall Street Journal, I think January 1st, 1995. And then November, they sent me back to Hong Kong and I joined the editorial page. So I wrote the Abreast of the Market column. I covered the stock market for 11 months in ’95.

Doug Monroe:

Okay. Well, it sounds like you were there more or less. I got into finance in ’82. And the junk bond market started. Michael Milken, all the I that the corruption. And so, you got started more into the tech.com…

Mike Gonzalez:

Yes.

Doug Monroe:

… Era. With the bust?

Mike Gonzalez:

The ’95 economy began in the summer, early fall of ’95. I wrote the front page story when the Dow broke 4,000.

Doug Monroe:

4,000. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Gonzalez:

And the Dow had floated with 4,000 for like a decade and a half. And then when it finally broke through 4,000, people don’t realize what a barrier that was. Because it’s now what, a 35?

Doug Monroe:

Yeah. Totally crazy.

Mike Gonzalez:

And it never looked back. But it had taken a while.

Doug Monroe:

We have a whole lot in common actually. We could talk about that for a long time. For a long time.

 What attracted your family to the U.S. as immigrants?

Mike Gonzalez:

Actually, it had a lot to do with the organizing principles. The US, because of its organizing principles, was, and it still is very clearly, well, less so under Biden, very clearly a symbol of prosperity and of freedom. And it was that. It was a beacon of all these things very clearly to Cubans who understood the danger and the threat of communism and the tyranny of communism. The US was the beacon of freedom with no rivals. This is a Europe that back then as well as today, flirted with socialism, had thriving communist parties. George Marche, the leader of Francis Communist Party, was the leader of a big party. Francois Mitterrand, the leader of the Socialist Party, nearly won the election I think in 1974. And indeed he did win in 1980. He became president of France as socialist.

So the organizing principles of the US making it the land of hope, the land of opportunity, but especially the land of the free, were very much… And the US has become that because of its organizing principles. We can go into that natural law, natural right, et cetera. I did no natural law, natural right as a kid of 12, or 13, or 14. But I could see, we could all sense the US as the land of hope and freedom.

Systemic racism in America? Affirmative Action and the Summer of 2020

Mike Gonzalez:

We’re doing this interview in late July. The Supreme Court of the United States has just dealt blow to institutional racism, to systemic racism in getting rid of racial preferences in university admissions. That was a real clear case of systemic racism in which universities said that they were going to count race as a plus in a holistic model, a holistic approach to making decisions as to whom to admit at universities. Now we don’t have it anymore. So, if you want to talk about systemic racism, we are much freer of it today because of the Supreme Court.

Now, I don’t agree that the US is systemically racist. I think that’s actually one of the fallacies that the left is selling in this country, because it is very clear that if you get people to believe that we have institutional, structural, and systemic racism, ergo, logically, the thing that Americas need to do is to replace all the structures, all the institutions in the system itself. Now, what does the word system means? The word system is just a Greek origin word that means the way everything works. And in fact, you find that the architects of critical race theory, Richard Delgado, who I’m going to quote almost verbatim here, they say that racism exists in the ordinary business of society. That is nonsense. And no, we don’t need to change all the structures, the systems, and the institutions. What we need to do is perfect America.

America is not perfect. It never will be. So by the way, it’s a place on earth. We’re humans, i.e Imperfect. Maybe we’ll meet perfection after go on to the other life. But on this earth, we’re going to be imperfect. Humans have many bad chips. We have rapists, we have murderers, we have racists. We have some good chips too, by the way. But man has fallen. So we have to recognize that. But this idea that we’re going to have to deconstruct and dismantle systemic racism to get to utopia, all utopias end in carnage and tears. So I really urge everybody to just not think in these terms, not to accept what the new cultural Marxists are selling. And this is really the inflection point in 2020.

When the left had been talking about this incessantly from 2013 to 2020 with the emergence of BLM, they have been studies that have been made, including one by Zach Goldberg that was published in Tablet in September, 2020, showing that the media began to use these terms on steroids after 2013 is because of BLM. So white supremacy, systemic racism will begin to be used by the New York Times, or Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal. But really is in 2020 when the managers and the heads of all our elite cultural institutions surrender and accept that we have systemic racism, and begin to do… The country goes into a trance, a period of mass hysteria, in which we do anything we can to get rid of systemic racism. But that, I think, has been a big, big mistake. And I think enough everyday Americans have woken up to this. And here we are in the middle of 2023 in a point in which both two sides of America are having a great and consequential war of ideas.

How should we deal with racism in the U.S.? 

Doug Monroe:

Well, I certainly agree with what you’re saying, Mike. I know that just in my personal experience for the last 40 years in the professional world, we’ve done nothing but fight against systemic racism. And I think that there’s certainly racism in people’s hearts, but you’re never going to eliminate that.

Mike Gonzalez:

And they are racist.

Doug Monroe:

But it’s as low as I’ve ever experienced it in my life, and that’s all I can say.

Mike Gonzalez:

Now, you and I both know that there are racists in America. We have encountered them. And to deny that will be folly. And the thing to do is wherever they break the law, we prosecute them. We give them no space, we don’t accept them, we don’t accept their speech. We personally say, “No, that’s not cool with me, and I’m not going to laugh at that. That’s stupid and evil.” And that’s how we deal with it. Or we deal with through the law. We have very good civil rights legislation to deal with that. But these are individual racists. Critical race theory believes that the individual racist and individual racism is not the problem at all. It’s the way racism is embedded in the everyday business of society that’s a falsehood.

 Are you optimistic or pessimistic about America? 

Mike Gonzalez:

So first of all, I am very optimistic. And the reason I’m optimistic is not just because I have a cheery personality, which I kind of do. My wife kids sometimes that if I wake up on Christmas morning and I find manure in front of the fireplace, I begin to wonder where the pony is. So I am optimistic. But the fact that Americans across the country have woken up to what the elites have done in accepting systemic racism and are fighting against it and saying, “No, no, we fight against racism ourselves.” But there is no systemic racism in what you’re doing through these so-called anti-racism training sessions. It’s just another version of Gramsci’s struggle sessions.

Belief in Reality and the Judeo-Christian Worldview’s Global Impact 

As to the worldview, yeah, I believe in the concepts of worldview. I mean, I don’t think that our worldview creates reality. I think reality exists. And I think you have truth, even transcendent truth. That is, it doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter whether I agree that the mantle and unstable is blue. It is blue. My worldview has nothing to do with it. However, we do have in America a very definite worldview, which is Judeo-Christian. And I say Judeo not to be cool. I do pray to the God of Abraham. I believe in the tablets of Mount Sinai that Moses brought down, that he so inadvisable broke the first time for which he paid a price, but which God made again, I believe. And those tablets contain truth, natural law truth. And I believe that then with the advent of our Lord, we add Christianity and its sense of forgiveness and redemption to it. And it really sets a worldview that is created by Judeo-Christian values, really is a worldview that has produced results on this earth.

Not that you should look at it that way and be utilitarian about it. There really is the only aspect, the only utilitarian thing about is individual salvation. But it has produced the world that we do have, which has our freedoms today. Our sense of individual rights come directly from the Judeo-Christian worldview. From the idea, as William Blackstone said, one of the 18th century philosophers, most often quoted by the founders, that this natural law and man’s law either ratifies it or violates it. And when written law, law written by humans violates natural law, it has no validity. That’s what William Blackstone said. That’s a worldview and a worldview I subscribe to.

 Identity Politics and The Plot to Change America 

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, I thought I had things to say. I had a view on identity politics, which is The Plot to Change America, which were forged by my research and the ideas that I had. And then it is a combination of first, my reporting world, my reporting life. I was a journalist for almost 20 years. But it’s really the things that I see and then added to it or the background is the research that I do. And I understood why identities have been created, racial identities. Why the left had pursued the creation of racial categories. And why the bureaucracy at first resisted and then threw in the towel. And then with BLM was the same way. Everything clicked in the fall of 2020 as to what was happening, why the country was making such an error. Not everyday Americans, but the leaders and the managers especially, of all our institutions.

That’s not just the academy and the media in Hollywood. But the permanent bureaucracy, even sports leagues, the clergy, K through 12 schooling, libraries, museum creators. I realized the mistake they were making, a lot of them because they were being good Americans, they felt white guilt. And I said, “Yeah, I have to write a book about this.” And my publishers agreed.

Cross Talk about Marx’s Homo Economicus 

Doug Monroe:

Well, I would say based on what I know. And I’m a Trotsky expert, believe it or not. That’s what I studied at UNC under a really terrific professor who was a leading scholar on Georgi Plekhanov, who was the father of Russian Marxism. But basically you had Marx giving up. His whole theory was based on homo economicus, right? And so Gramsci elevated that and really twisted it beyond what it was. And you also have 80 more years of history where the worker didn’t behave like Marx thought he should.

Mike Gonzalez:

Never revolted.

 Antonio Gramsci’s Mutation of Marxism

Mike Gonzalez:

There’s a couple of things. And I’ll touch on them and you let me know which one you want me to delve more deeply into. But you’re quite right. Gramsci represents a mutation of Marxism. Marx wrote in the theory on Feuerbach in 1845, that men’s nature was not fixed. There was some aspects of it actually. Marx believed that some aspects were fixed. But he also wrote in theories, his Theses on Feuerbach, that human nature was also a reflection of human relations. And Gramsci takes that and puts it on steroids about 70 years later, in the 1920s, and he writes, “This is the most satisfactory answer. In fact, human nature is not fixed at all, but it’s a result of human relations.”

It’s a result of human relations. And it’s this idea that then at first you don’t think, well, that’s interesting. But then when you think harder about it, you realize that what it does is it’s a denial of truth. And we were talking about earlier that what separates us is not really left and right, but is it believe in truth that truth exists, real truth, undeniable truth, eternal truth. And on the other side of the constructionists, people who believe that our worldview constructs truth, that there’s no truth, but except that as is constructed by our worldview, our conceptual superstructure. Or in Gramsci’s own term, the Hegemonic narrative. Now, Gramsci was an Italian communist, the founder of Italy’s Communist Party in 1921. And he had been a doer. He had been a man who joined the Council Revolution of the Biennio Rosso. The Biennio Rosso was something that took place in Italy between 1919 and 1920, a system of huge industrial strikes, I believe 16,000 in northern Italy.

And then the South, you had masses of peasants occupying farmland. And he had really tried to create an Italian Soviet, but that failed. At the end of the day, the Italian Socialist Party of which he was a member, decided not to go for revolution, not to follow what the Russians had done a year earlier in 1917 or two years earlier in Russia and overthrow society. And because the workers and the peasants, they had in Gramsci’s view, the Italian socialist party had not sufficiently indoctrinated the workers and the peasants. They did not have revolutionary consciousness. They had false consciousness. In other words, Marx had said in the manifesto that the family should be abolished, that private property should be abolished or most of it taken over, and that the state should be abolished. And earlier before the manifesto, he said, God, religion is the opiate of the people.

But Marx never met workers or peasants. He stayed his whole life inside the library, the British Library in London doing research or hanging out with Friedrich Engels, who was a millionaire. Or he met with revolutionaries in Paris and Brussels and so forth. Gramsci did. He attended council meetings and Gramsci said, “Wait a second. The Italian peasant and worker actually loves his wife and children. He likes what little property he has. He is actually patriotic, probably not as an Italian because Italy had just been created, but of his region, patriotic of his region, and he was faithful to God.” So all these things, Gramsci said, had to be deconstructed, we had to indoctrinate the workers. And then I leave it there, and you ask me whatever questions you have. The Trinity with the identity politics is that much later on in the US context…

So they actually give up on the American worker, and we can talk about Herbert Marcuse and all that. And Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher, who belongs to this very similar views to Gramsci, sees African-Americans rioting and reminds him of the riots he has seen in Germany after the war in 1918, except that also failed, just like the Italian revolution failed. And he said, “Ah.” And these are his words, “The ghetto population is going to lead the revolt, is the people of other races and other colors…” Again, his words, …”that are going to lead the revolution.” And for that, a whole new creation, new groups of people must be created that are non-white at a new categories in order to lead this revolution.

 The German Revolution’s Failure for Marxists 

Mike Gonzalez:

You’re absolutely right. Marx believed in homo economicus, and he believed that economics determined everything. And he talked about the material forces of man’s relationship to the forces of production. Gramsci said, “No,” this other stuff, God and the culture and his attachment to patriotism, that also is a force, and that’s a Gramscian innovation. So the same thing that I explained with Italy, with [foreign language] having failed, the German revolution failed. You had 1918, just barely months after the revolution, actually, exactly a year. I think we’re talking about October, November in 1918 in Germany. Germany’s still fighting World War I, but the German workers and soldiers and sailors especially begin to form councils.

And this famous one formed in Kiel, K I E L, which is a Baltic port in Germany, and they lead a revolt, a council revolt in Germany. And I believe within two weeks the Kaiser is gone. They overthrow the Kaiser. Germany’s been declared a republic, and the republic signs the armistice. So if you’re looking at this, it’s actually almost the same that had happened in Russia and the Czar. And it’s like, “Oh, we’re on our way to the German Soviet.” It didn’t happen.

The German Democratic Party, they said the social Democratic Party of the PDS does the same thing the Italian socialists did. They said, “No, our workers do not want to overthrow this. We don’t want Bolshevism here. We want improvements. We want labor improvements and introduce socialism through parliamentary democracy.” This Council Revolution, just like Gramsci had been, were really against representative democracy. They hated representative democracy. They believed in the direct democracy of the councils. So then the PDS, the Social Democratic Party of Germany creates a government, I believe, takes over in December 1918, and doesn’t do what the German communists wanted. In fact, they form the Freikorps which is an antecedent to the Nazis. And the Freikorps find the communist leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and the others, and killed them. Rosa Luxemburg was not just killed. She was tortured, and her body was thrown in the river, was not discovered again until the spring.

The Rise of the Frankfurt School 

Mike Gonzalez:

And then this leads two years later, in 1923, 3 years later, to German Marxists, hardcore Marxists, not just intellectuals, but intellectuals as well, meeting and saying, “What happened? What happened? We need answers to this.” And they create the Institute for Social Research. They were going to call it the Institute for Marxism, at the University of Gotha in Frankfurt. But then the funders, especially the main funder, Felix Bale, but also the other thinkers, said, “No, that’s going to be too provocative. Let’s try to downplay our Marxism and conceal it.” But it was a Marxist thing. We had the communications, we do the Institute of Social Research. And the Marx Lenin Institute in Moscow were very strong. Many people who were at the meeting in Rynjah in 1923 and the [inaudible] were participants in the Council of Revolts. And the councils themselves, they were Marxists, they were communists.

So they create this, we know this institute as the Frankfurt School, that’s the colloquial name for it. They have to flee Germany because of the advent of Hitler in 1933.

Frankfurt School (with Marcuse) to the U.S. Introduces Critical Theory

Mike Gonzalez:

And they land in the US. Columbia University offers some offices at Teachers College on Morningside Heights. I believe it’s 123rd. I am in New York a lot, and I always pass Teachers College. And I remember, “Oh my God, they were here.” And they begin to write about the United States. The third director of the institute, then Max Horkheimer, writes in 1937, a very insightful, for them, essay called Traditional Theory and Critical Theory. And he says he juxtaposes the two is this traditional theory is what creates the conceptual superstructure that leads to capitalism and parliamentary democracy in the country and what we had in the United States and most of Western Europe at that point, not Germany obviously, or Mussolini, Italy.

And what we need is critical theory to question all the tenets, to question all the basics, to revolutionize. And it’s an incessant questioning of the Judeo-Christian worldview in order to undermine it. And they did not like the United States. They thought that we were boring boobs who were just happy, but were not good revolutionaries. This is a problem they always have. They were very happy to go back to Germany after the US Army liberates Germany. They go back to Germany, I believe, in 1949, Adorno and Pollock and Horkheimer. But they leave behind, pollock may have died. But going from memory, Adorno definitely, and Horkheimer definitely, but Marcuse, who was Horkheimer’s assistant, Herbert to Marcuse, who was younger, gets left behind. And he actually goes to work for the State Department. The CIA hires him. He does analysis for them for some time with the precursor to the CIA.

And then he becomes a professor of philosophy and begins to write books and has ideas that are really undermining America. He writes Eros and Civilization in 1955 in which he writes that we can use sex to destroy the family and therefore destroy society. And the urge for sex is so strong, one of man’s greatest urges that we can use this to destroy the monogamic family, the monogamous family. And then in 1964, he writes, One Dimensional Man, also becomes a bestseller. And the New York Times calls him the guru of the new left, and the new left with these new Marxists who were no longer attached, or they’re no longer really agents of Moscow who wanted to introduce Marxism in America. They were Americans, American-born Marxists. And in Great Britain, they were British-born Marxists, in Japan, Japanese-born Marxist, Canada… Because the new left is a phenomenon that takes place in Canada, Japan, Western Europe and the United States.

And the guru of the new left, Herbert Marcuse, is sitting there in 1966 or 67, and he sees the riot, and that reminds him of the council movement that reminds him of Kiel. He was in Kiel, I forget what city, I think he may have been in Frankfurt himself. And he says, “Ah, American workers, no good.” One of the things that the new left was doing is they were looking for substitute proletariat, somebody who’s going to substitute the American worker as the agent of Revolution. And Herbert Marcuse has his insight and says he’s going to be the ghetto population people of other races. And he takes a direct hand in this.

And he is the philosophy teacher of Angela Davis, the communist that then became a leader in the Black Panther, was arrested after a chase. He was on the FBI Sussana list because she was involved and she was involved in the murder of a judge. She had bought the gun. But she ended up, she’s not acquitted. I mean, she’s acquitted. She’s not found guilty. And he taught her philosophy at Brandeis in Boston, and he was her teacher again in San Diego later on. And we can go into Angela Davis later. Abby Hoffman is another student to Herbert Marcuse. And his writing, he’s the one man, and there are not many in this list, that is criticized by name, by the Vatican, by the Pope in the late sixties.

Doug Monroe:

So the Frankfurt School got implanted. You had a break in theory with Gramsci that set it all up. The troops came in with the Frankfurt School. And it was a situation where you talk about, I don’t know whether it’s Machiavelli or Arab thinking, where “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But all these minorities started seeing… They had a similar goal to bring down America in a later stage capitalism situation.

Gramsci’s Connections to the Frankfurt School and Belief in a Super Structure 

Mike Gonzalez:

The first interesting thing is the link between Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, and they had no direct links. But they did have a couple of friends in common. One was George Lukacs, who was an Hungarian thinker. He had been the Minister of Culture in the short-lived Bela Kun government in 1919. One of the few places in Western Europe or Central Europe, if you want to say Hungary is in Central Europe, where there’s a Soviet that is created outside of the Soviet Union is in Hungary in 1919. It lasts 133 days because they went really fast, really, really hard. George Lukacs as the minister, the [inaudible] Culture, for example, introduced the teaching of sex to young children as another way to break up the family. And he says that very clearly. And he was a friend of Gramsci.

And there was another figure, Clara Zetkin, who had met Gramsci in Moscow when Gramsci spent some time in Moscow attending the [inaudible]. And then she became one of the instigators of the Frankfurt School. She was one of the ideological thinkers, and her son was, I believe his name was Maxim Zetkin, was at the meeting in Thuringia. So there’s some links that way. But the explanation is pretty much the same. Gramsci calls it the Hegemonic Narrative.

Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School believed in a superstructure. But in both, the reality doesn’t really exist. The reality is what we make of it. If we change the superstructure, we change this worldview, we change reality. And they don’t believe that human nature is fixed.

Enlightenment, Marxism, postmodernism, deconstructionism: Where the break?

Mike Gonzalez:

With the Postmodernist, I’m actually of the school that the Postmodernists do not have as direct an influence of BLM and the Americans. I know that in the early seventies and mid and late seventies when I was meeting people, I was in college myself and meeting people who were going to college… I had a good friend who went to Yale, for example, who had studied Derrida and Foucault, and I forget who the third one is right now, Jean Francois, it’s going to come to me in a second. And they had studied them, but it’s the same thing.

The deconstructionists, it’s the same thing. It’s deconstructionism. They believe that if you look at a book and you get a passage in a book, it’s not really what the author intended. But you can make anything you want out of that passage. You can deconstruct a passage and reconstruct it. I happen to be with the opinion that the author’s intent actually should have an impact on your thinking. So they were just another Postmodernist. And I think it depends on how you think of the Enlightenment, whether the Enlightenment is a break. It’s a break with all tradition.

And so a lot of people today, a lot of conservatives begin to believe that actually is the Enlightenment in breaking with virtue and holistic in Aristotelian view of the good life that creates the rot we have today. Or if it’s really a break with the Enlightenment that you have in Postmodernism. Enlightenment is the modern age. It’s not the sixties. The Postmodernists see them… It’s a mutation of the Enlightenment in thinking, “Well, no, these realities are not really realities. We can deconstruct and reconstruct everything.” So they are on the same page as the Gramscis and the Frankfurt school.

Doug Monroe:

That’s fascinating. I’m not as well-read as you are, obviously, in all this, but I’ve never heard anyone say as definitively as you that Postmodernism really is a sideline to some extent. They all are attacking truth in a certain way.

Truth, Marxism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, and Critical Legal Studies 

Doug Monroe:

But there’s one thing I want to throw out, just friend to friend. I think it’s Terry Eagleton or Eggleston. He’s British and he’s a Marxist, but he’s really violently against Postmodernism. He says that Marxism is very truth-based. It’s totally truth-based.

Mike Gonzalez:

That’s right.

Doug Monroe:

It’s Marxist truth.

Mike Gonzalez:

Right. That’s right.

Doug Monroe:

So it has really nothing in common with Postmodernists at all.

Mike Gonzalez:

I had an hour and a half debate with a Canadian communist who was saying the same thing. And she swears at, not by Gramsci. She thinks that Gramsci corrupts Marxism. But I want to make an amendment to what I just said. The Postmodernists do have an influence on critical legal studies, which is the first, the American child of critical theory. They are the first. They’re not translating things from German. They’re actually writing things in American English. And that’s a discipline that emerges in American law schools in the 1970s that leads directly into critical race theory. Critical race theory is a child of critical legal studies, just as critical legal studies is a child of critical theory. But critical legal studies is also greatly influenced by the Postmodernists. And you have people like Duncan Kennedy who say, “Yeah, no, the Postmodernists, [foreign language] the third, the Trinity in Postmodernism. Kennedy is very open about the influences of… Because he lived in Europe for many years.

So there is a way in which the Postmodernists influence critical legal studies. The Postmodernists, however, they did not have a political program. Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the creators of Critical Race Theory, says she didn’t like that about the critical legal scholars. They were two postmodernists. They were too fuzzy, they were too wooly. They did not have a clear political program. She wants a political program. So really, that’s why I would say that Postmodernism, lacking a political program and being more of a literary criticism, it’s just as bad and it’s just as truth denying. But they have an influence on critical legal studies. But why don’t we talk about critical legal studies as much today, and we constantly talk about critical race theory because Critical Race Theory, it’s all about politics. Critical legal studies was about destroying the legal system and the law.

Davos, the World Economic Forum, and Profits 

Mike Gonzalez:

Actually, I have less to say about it merely because I’ve researched it less, and some people fault me for that. There are other people here at Heritage who research it more. What I think, and it’s not as influenced by hardcore research, is that if you have a division today between the Davos Crowd and for example, this aversion of the World Economic Forum. It’s a world social forum created by communists in Puerto Lago, Brazil in 2001, to oppose the World Economic Forum. And the world’s social forum really is fighting hard against the profit motive. Davos is not. Davos is more of a corporatist view. Who are the corporatists? The Salazar in Portugal, Franklin, Spain, and Mussolini. Corporatism is the economic policy of Mussolini in which the government…

Doug Monroe:

True Fascism.

Mike Gonzalez:

Right, right. Government in the big corporations act together and government dictates to corporations. And this is what you have today with the Biden administration calling Facebook and Twitter and all social media and saying, “You do not run anything that goes against Fauci or what we want to say about Covid-19.” What we want to say about race and the social media companies doing the bidding of the Biden administration, even though this is illegal, and a lot of this is going to come out today because the government cannot get involved in First Amendment violations. And people say, “Well, it was just Twitter doing that. It was Facebook.” No, no. It was the Biden administration calling them. And that’s the illegal in the constitutional part. But there’s no difference in that between that and Salazar the dictator of Portugal.

So I have a good friend, John O’Sullivan, who was, I think it was a speech writer for Margaret Thatcher before that. He, I think worked for the Times of London. He said he covered Salazar and Salazar would go to a town in Portugal and say, “In this town, we will soon we’ll have a sardine-canning factory in Salazar.” We get back to Lisbon, pick up the phone and call up a company and say, “I want a sardine-canning factory in such and such a town.” And the company would build it there. And that’s corporatism. And that is the Biden administration calling Twitter and Facebook and saying, “I want you to nullify or to cancel this narrative that I don’t want to hear.” So that I think is more the Davos. I’m more concerned with the actual Marxists that people who hate the prophet motive of people who want to destroy capitalism and parliamentary democracy.

Doug Monroe:

It’s a whole different journey they have.

A plot to change America? What’s Dividing Us: Categories and Grievances

Mike Gonzalez:

So what I say to that question, I get that question a lot, is that there are no Thursday night meetings in Berkeley, California or in a basement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s a plot in the sense that the people engaged have all read the same books, have all been influenced by the same thinkers, and it’s not just Gramsci and Marcusa and Horkheimer and Jean Francois [inaudible], but it is enough of them. They all have the same interpretation. And I just named the Europeans. I didn’t name the Americans, Derek Bell, Kimberly Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, Richard Delgado, Duncan Kennedy, a lot of people. So they all deport from the same starting point, and that is that we’re systemically racist, that we’re systemically oppressive, and if you have lived at least a year in seven countries, and if you count living months at a time living in a place… I’ve lived in definitely over 10 countries, so I can really compare and contrast and I can put my hand on the Bible, even a Catholic Bible and say that America is just by no means an oppressive country. We’re the freest country on earth.

So they depart from the same… And they also depart from the idea that we must have different categories. We talking about Hispanics earlier. This is purely made up. They had to go out and create high ball from… In a way, all the racial categories that we use right now are incredibly monolithic. The white category is very monolithic because includes people of different ancestry. Not all Europeans. We count Armenians, for example, as white Americans and Syrian and Lebanese Americans as what Americans, but definitely when you talk about the category of African American, the category of Hispanic American, Asian Americans. These are really wooly categories created by the activists. So they all depart from that and they all depart from the idea that all the members of the non-white categories should feel grievances.

You were talking earlier about whether had met with racism. Not knowingly, you’ve also been affected by that expecting me… Actually I had… Obviously I’ve heard things that I didn’t want to hear, but I’ve had a very good life in America. I am not a person filled with grievances, which is what the left wants to make people, because if you have grievances, then you will work actively to transform the country. That’s the plot. That is the plot. And the fact that they don’t have Thursday night meetings in basements in Brooklyn doesn’t mean that a plot does not exist.

  Would conspirators destroy the Constitution? 

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, it depends on who you talk to. If you’re talking about definitely there are enough people who think the Constitution is tainted and that the Constitution really institutionalizes racism and slavery because of the three fifth clause, which is always misunderstood and unexplained for a reason. So many, many of them do think the constitution is tainted and it’s not valid and should be done away with others. Others who want to amend the Constitution, which is a legal process, but it’s a constitution with a small C. The way the country’s constituted and the approach to the Constitution is the Constitution first written in ’87, in 1787, discussed and debated and then ratified a year later, is that a “living document?” One which we can infuse new meaning into, in which case we can live with a constitution because you just infuse it with new meaning and deconstruct it. Do a Gramsci or Marcusa or [inaudible] job on it and deconstruct the constitution and reconstruct it if it’s a living document, and then make it mean anything we want.

For example, the Supreme Court did with Roe, which even Justice Ginsburg said was a bad decision because it found a right that did not exist in the Constitution. So if you can do that to the Constitution, there’s no need to get rid of it.

Cross Talk About Identity Politics Categories 

Doug Monroe:

Well, I know that when I was a kid, my parents had been drilling into me Martin Luther King’s statement about I want to be judged by the content of my character to see people as individuals, to see people by their character, by their abilities, by their… You can’t say all Jews think alike. You can’t say all Blacks think alike. You can’t say all Hispanics. That’s not even a category.

Mike Gonzalez:

That’s [inaudible].

Doug Monroe:

Whites isn’t even a category.

Mike Gonzalez:

It is a category. Those two are categories. Hispanics and Whites are categories. They’re just incredibly monolithic.

Doug Monroe:

Exactly. They’re so broad. They’re not that useful.

Imbedded Errors in Identity Politics

Doug Monroe:

Okay, let’s go to the fundamental error of identity politics that you go to great lengths in short copy, but you really zero in on this and the plot to change America. And that is what I call here the category issue where race, sex, economic class-

Mike Gonzalez:

Not economic class.

Doug Monroe:

This is a fundamental error in thinking about humans and human beings, is it not?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, they have to-

Doug Monroe:

You talk about this Hispanic or Latino at great length and really blister that whole claim.

Mike Gonzalez:

They have to get rid of economic class as the creator of the category that is the agent of revolutionary change because economic class changes and is very mutable. I myself have been wealthy. I myself have been very poor, so poor that I ate at soup kitchens or I have been middle class, which is really what I would call myself today. I went to college, including an Ivy League college. And so these things change in life. What does not change is race. What does not change is national origin. Both my parents were born in Cuba, and that is unchangeable. That’s a reality. Race is a reality and get ready for the next one. Sex is a reality and it’s unchangeable. So if you place the agency for revolution in these categories, then you have a better chance at being able to bring revolution about.

Doug Monroe:

And why are those errors? Why would you say that thinking about these unchangeable categories are not useful?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, first of all, because race is a reality. Sex is a reality, and national origin is a reality. I guess I’m openly at war with their strategy and what they have in mind, which is to transform America through the creation of these categories and the instilling of grievances into the members of the category. Speaking of the patriarchy or speaking of systemic racism or in the case of climate, because climate also comes into it as one of the fronts in the war of extractive oppression. I’m against doing that. I’m also though less so, but I’m against the idea that these categories are really all there is. I happen to be a Roman Catholic, and that is important to me. It’s important to my worldview. It informs my worldview, and yet it’s nowhere on the census. The government doesn’t care about it. The government says, the gnomes in the Census Bureau are constantly saying, “Well, people are not finding themselves. Hispanics are not finding themselves in the census.” Well, what about Presbyterians? What about Jehovah witnesses? They’re not finding themselves in the census.

And does anybody care about that? No. The fact that I work at Heritage means a lot to me. My job description or my job in life is not in the census, is not one of the categories that matters to people. The fact that I’m a father and a husband, a member of my neighborhood, these are identities that matter a lot to me of my community, my real community. My real community is physical. It’s the corner store. It’s not some created community. People say to me, what do people in your community think? It was like, who are you talking about? They talking about Cuban Americans? I see my children who are half Cuban American once in a while, and we talk about football or baseball. We talk about our issues of morality. We talk about, but we don’t… It’s ridiculous for anybody to expect me to be a spokesman for Cuban Americans, let alone Hispanics.

That is just ludicrous. And yet, especially from [inaudible] on, the racial preferences of affirmative action, were based on that idea that diversity, the state has an interest in diversity in the classroom, which means if you follow this logical conclusion that people will be ambassadors of their categories, that people are expected to, if the diversity matters in a boardroom or in a jury room, then that means that people bring in, when they come in, they come in quo African Americans or quo whites or quo Hispanic Americans. And that is a ludicrous idea. People are minorities of one, and I’m not denying local culture. I’m not denying the impact that being a Cuban American has on me, or people who, for example, I went to college in Boston. Being Irish American was very meaningful to many people there. Being Italian Americans when I came to the United States in the early seventies, being Italian American was very meaningful. It’s very meaningful today to people in parts of New York that Volpe is doing so well as a shortstop for the New York Yankees.

But this is carried to a ludicrous extent by the proponents of identity politics and for nefarious reasons.

 Why critical theory’s focus on sex? Destroy the Family, Totalitarianism 

Mike Gonzalez:

There’s two separate things here. And the way George Lucoch used it or the way Herbert Marcusa intended to use it is to use sex as an urge with which to split the family, the monogamous family. And because the family is the base institutional society, the most important of the [inaudible] little platoons to destroy society that way, which is their aim. Marxist’s favorite phrase from Dr. Faus was everything that exists deserves to be destroyed, and they want to destroy everything. They want to do genocide with the culture. So that’s one thing. The other though related is gender theory, all the radical gender theories, everything from the latter waves of feminism to the whole transgender revolution that we’re witnessing at the moment. And that what I say when I write is that this could be the most Marxist of all the radical theories. And we discussed this earlier, how especially post Gramsci, there is no fixed human nature and this is what they celebrate.

The human nature is malleable. Conservatives, at least my kind of conservative, believes in fixed truth or even transcendent truth. And the natural law, the divine law, the founders wrote about this. There are things you don’t have to believe in religion or reveal religion to take from nature through the use of your reason to take away basic truths about life. And these truths that I think were edged I believe by God and commandments that shall not covet neighbor’s wife, thou shall not murder, that shall not steal. Gender theories don’t even believe in sexes. They believe that we don’t have male and female, that the Y chromosome doesn’t mean anything, that sex is on a fluid spectrum.

So that is an absolute, and they don’t even want… Not only do they have ridiculous pronouns, but they want to impose these pronouns on us who don’t want to live by lies. And if we use the wrong pronouns, we can be canceled from life. We can be fired. In some instances, they want to make this hate speech to misgender somebody, make that into a form of hate speech that is prosecutable as a crime. This is Stalinism. This is totalitarianism, and we must never succumb to that. I will call you… If you choose to call yourself Sally, I will respect that. I will call you Sally, but what I will not do is refer to you as she, because then I’m complicit in a lie. I’m contributing to it, and I refuse to do that. And yet people are beginning to pay very heavy prices for that. But even if you take… So that is one extreme, and they have gone really far on that. They’re losing Americans left and right. I do mean literally left and right on this issue.

But if you take even the waves of feminism that want to deny femininity or the feminine urge to procreate and rear a family, and that is something that is real. That also is a denial of reality.

Loudon County: Global Ground Zero for the Left’s Logical Fallacies 

Doug Monroe:

I don’t know if you have a chapter on it, but I kind of made a list of the self-referential contradictions that they get into, and I made a list of them like, there is no truth. Well, there’s a truth statement, or we need strict morality to eliminate morality or to assure individual rights. We have to collectivize. And they’re just a series of these claims that are direct contradictions. I guess my question is, is America waking up to this? And what are the consequences of this kind of… It’s an Orwellian trait.

Mike Gonzalez:

It’s Orwellian and I think everyday Americans… So at the end of 2020 when everybody was wearing a [inaudible] mask and we’re keeping a safe distance six feet away from each other, [inaudible] to travel. I started to travel the United States. In 2021, I visited about 30 cities. I came close to that, I think 23 cities in 2022. I have visited fewer cities this year, 2023, but I am getting ready to travel again, I think in 2024. And what I discovered was everyday Americans, of all the categories really upset by this. They were rebelling, revolting against the idea that our children had to be used as cannon fodder in this culture war that they were playing the privilege game with little children, separating them by race, or the fact that the office, whether a workplace, either an office or factory floor, had been turned over into Gramscian struggle sessions.

Gramsci was one that came up with the idea that because the worker liked the family, liked the country, liked private property, and liked God, he had to be constantly introduced to these struggle sessions in the workplace on the factory floor with new ideas, whether he would be indoctrinated into this dislike of all these things. Well, everyday Americans did not know who Antonio Gramsci was, but they rightly saw through their common sense and through their reason that these things were struggle sessions, even though they didn’t call them struggle sessions, that they were alien to the way of life. And they said no. And they turned out in the streets and complained. I actually visited Loudoun County early on. I spoke to a large group there in June, 2021, outside the government building in the county seat. And then as I traveled the country and I told them that I had been in Loudoun County, everyone knew where Loudoun County was, and people used the same expression, ground zero.

Loudoun County is ground zero. Loudoun County [inaudible] Virginia, which is really an hour and a half away from here, is ground zero for this revolution, this new American revolution. I even visited Europe and I spoke to groups in Europe and in Barcelona, Spain to talk to me about Loudoun County. It became an international thing. So I think that we are beginning to… And one of the reasons for this reaction is the contradictions. We’re supposed to.. A linear western mind. And yes, we do have a linear Western mind in this country as part of the American worldview is supposed to experience system shutdown when faced with a contradiction. Contradiction is race is a social creation, and yet race is the most important thing in the world. You’re supposed to say, well, hang on. Okay, I’m going to have to stop there and work through the… Because that’s not logical. That’s not a good syllogism. So I’m going to stop and work that out before I continue to the next step. And that’s what Americans did in their mind.

 The History of Black Lives Matter/BLM/World Social Forum 

Mike Gonzalez:

The Combahee River Collective, which I think is from the late seventies, was I think the first time that we have the term identity politics used in the way that we mean today, which is a political division of the country into categories. The BLM architects, way before Black Lives Matter was even a thing was even invented, they had been reared in these ideas, ideas spawned by the Combahee River Collective and definitely by the critical race theorists about systemic racism, systemic oppression, and so on. The carceral state, the fact that they have to get rid of not just the prison system, but also of the system of justice as we know it in prisons, in jails, in the jail system, have to stop building them and get rid of them and go on to something called restorative justice, which is basically putting the victim and the criminal on the same plain and saying, an event has happened, let them work out, which is really ridiculous.

So Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and [inaudible] but definitely mostly the first two, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors were two African American women who went through this socialization indoctrination early on, even in high school, definitely in college. They were recruited. And I used the word of one of the recruiters, Eric Mann, who’s a former member of The Weather Underground, a man who… That’s a terrorist organization who spent some time in prison for assault and battery in the eighties. In ’89 actually, he creates a labor community strategy center in Los Angeles, and I believe it was around the year 2000 that he writes in a book, the Labor Community Strategy Center recruits a young woman, a very intelligent young woman by the name of Patrisse Cullors, who’s 17. And she has said subsequently in an interview this video of it that she was just an angry woman.

She was just really angry and because of her conditions in life and the Labor Community Strategy Center taught her about Marx, taught her about Mao, taught her about Lenin, taught her how to organize in the way that Alinsky kind of created for us Americans, and that it gave her a purpose, but it really gave her… Channeled her into revolution. And she has said this. And Alicia Garza, another young woman who’s going to create BLM in 2013, gets recruited, I believe in 2004, 2005, by the School of Unity and Liberation, which is founded by Harmony Goldberg, who is a Gramscian, who is a cultural anthropologist, I believe. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology who’s a very good expert…

She has a PhD in cultural anthropology, who’s a very good expert on Gramsci who writes about Gramsci’s war of positions and war of maneuvers, about the hegemonic narrative, the need to indoctrinate, the need to infiltrate the institutions of society. So she writes about this, it’s one of the subjects of her study.

She recruits Alicia Garza into the School of Unity and Liberation. And then Alicia Garza, I believe was the one, or one of the two, say that they’re politicized and socialized, but especially by the World Social Forum, which was created by world communists, especially Latin American communists, but also European communists, as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

They created the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, and they began to have meetings, world meetings. And it was at the meeting in 2006 in Caracas that Hugo Chavez, the communist dictator of Venezuela, addresses a huge crowd. And Cindy Sheehan was there, if you remember her from the Bush era. And the Cuban leaders were there, and communist leaders from across the hemisphere are there. And he says, Hugo Chavez says, “The World Social Forum, we need the United States. We need American presence.” He’s speaking to shout “Viva”,[inaudible], “long live the United States.” And people are… in this anti-American setting. And he says, “The American giant’s going to wake up. We need to take the fight inside the United States.”

And lo and behold, what happens in 2007, the World Social Forum creates a US Social forum. And Alicia Garza is on the organizing committee of the World Social Forum. And I says, this writes itself. And the World Social Forum, that meeting in Atlanta in 2007 is at that meeting that they create the National Domestic Workers Alliance. And why the National Domestic Workers Alliance? Because domestic workers tend to be women immigrants, immigrant women of the new non-white categories, and they want to organize them as agents of change, revolutionary agents. And I think as Alicia Garza says that, “I’ve become politicized within this context of the US Social Forum.”

And what is interesting is they already hard-boiled Marxists who are waiting in the wings.

Doug Monroe:

That’s as hard-boiled as you can get. I don’t think people really understand that it really is a conspiracy. I mean that clearly is at every step they’re doing something to achieve a short-term goal of revolution.

Mike Gonzalez:

And it gets even better. It gets even better. I had video of Alicia Garza in 2010 speaking in Oakland saying, “We created the World Social Forum because we were told by Latin American leaders, by third world leaders, you got to go home to the US and take the US boot off our neck. Take the US boot off our neck.” She says this in 2010. This is a very clear continuum.

2013, George Zimmerman is acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Alicia Garza writes a Facebook posting saying “Black Lives Matter”. Patrisse Cullors notices it, puts a hashtag in front, creates a social-media thing. Opal Tometi, the third of the leaders, who also attends all of these world meetings says, “We need to create a web space.” And that’s how the webpage for Black Lives Matter is created and is shared by all of that bevy of networks they’re a part of of international and domestic Marxist networks. And the thing takes off.

But it really, really gels in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 after the killing of Michael Brown. And we know now that this idea of “hands up, don’t shoot” was just a fiction. Well, these things are fiction, but you have a lot of riots. In 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, the FBI is prevented from really stopping any conspiracy against the United States.

Alicia Garza is sent to Ferguson to organize Marxists by whom? By the National Domestic Workers Alliance. They’re the ones who paid her way to Ferguson in 2014, created, just let me jog your memory, in Atlanta in 2007 at the US Social Forum. It’s not a conspiracy, but it is.

The BLM’s platform or goals? 

Mike Gonzalez:

You have to read “The Communist Manifesto”, because it’s the same platform. It is against the family. An interesting point, a colleague of mine, Andy Olivastro, who’s now the head of development here, he and I wrote a piece for the New York Post in July 2020 saying, look at their 13 points they advocate for. One of, I forget which point it was, said they wanted to get rid of the Western-prescribed nuclear family. And we’d say they don’t want to get rid of the family.

And after that, so we know, Andy and I know, that that was read when it was reposted by Heritage, that was read by one million people. So it must’ve been read by even more people when it was in the New York Post, one of the largest circulation papers in the country.

Soon after that, what do you know? BLM gets rid of that line from its website. They’re like the good Stalinists. So they established, by the way, in 2014, I believe, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, BLMGNF. And that is one of the main BLM organizations. Another one is Movement for Black Lives.

So they are really global. They are global. I just explained how connected they were with the World Social Forum, also with the Foro de Sao Paulo. They’re completely global.

So they create the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. What does that mean? It means they’re also against the state. Just like Marx wanted the state to wither away. They’re against private property, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors are very open about this. Alicia Garza speaking to LeftRoots in 2015, gives a speech. There’s also video of this saying, black lives cannot matter on the capitalism. We have to get rid of capitalism.

She said to another instance, there’s no video of this, but she’s been quoted, she was quoted by the Maine newspaper as telling a group in Maine that her goal is to dismantle the organizing principle of society, which we discussed earlier, what their organizing principle is. So they’re anti-private property, they’re anti-family, their anti-nation state. These are three. Now I won’t say that they’re anti-God, because they say that they believe in God, and I don’t question people. I don’t have divine powers. I cannot look into somebody’s soul and say, “No, they do not believe in God.” But the other three things they advocate.

And they want to change who we are. So when they say they’re abolitionists, you think, “Oh, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln.” They’re not that kind of abolitionists. They want to abolish what they call the carceral state. They want to abolish a system of justice. They want to abolish prisons, they want to abolish… And it doesn’t take a degree from Cal Tech to figure out that without a system of justice, society dissolves, pure chaos. Well, that is what they want. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature.

Did Black Lives Matter orchestrate 2020’s riots? 

Mike Gonzalez:

I keep calling for Congress to investigate. They did say, I do forget now, in their progress report, which they published in 2021, I think they sent out 124 million emails. Check me on that. I have it in my book. And it was the ACLED, the Armed Conflict and Force Location group in Princeton, did a very good report on this. I think it disappeared from the website, but I have it. I archived it. Which it said in 2020, there were 12,000 protests. Now, the TV kept telling those mostly peaceful. A small percentage of 12,000 is a lot. So over 660 of these events were coded as riots by ACLED, the Armed Forces Location Project, which is housed in Princeton. And they said that 95% of these 660 events coded as riots for which we know the identity of the participant, they were BLM related. So that is a very large number of the riots in which that are BLM related.

I do believe that Congress should investigate because violence took place. The Supreme Court has said that you can have peaceable protest. That is constitutional. What is not constitutional is the destruction of private property or of life.

 The relationship between Black Lives Matter and Antifa? 

Mike Gonzalez:

So Antifa is, I don’t believe, is ideological, because more than Marxists, they’re anarchists. They’re also a lot more white, apparently. They have some similar features. There’s some relationship with former members of the Weather Underground. There’s some relations with the Foro de Sao Paulo and Latin American leftists, but to a much less degree. If you go through the attendance at meetings and the discussions at groups like the US Social Forum, or the World Social Forum, or Left Forum, or LeftRoots, this is really BLM, and the people who are involved with BLM, they’re there, they’re members, and so are participants from China and Venezuela and the outside world.

The same I don’t find with Antifa. So I have paid less attention to Antifa. I think Antifa are very destructive, very violent. I don’t minimize their damage. I just think that their damage is less. Obviously, if you are walking down the street and you are met with an Antifa group that is trying to coerce you into doing something, that’s not pretty either. That’s just as bad as a group from BLM threatening to smash your face. But I feel less of a threat to the republic from Antifa. That’s why I devoted less time to them.

Where is the Black Lives Matter movement and their leaders today?

Mike Gonzalez:

Where the BLM leaders are, there’s been a lot of stories in the press. One particular journalist, Andrew Kerr of the Washington Examiner has been stellar in his reporting on them. They have spent a lot of money that was an accounted for. They bought a mansion in Toronto, by the way. So they spend millions of dollars in this building in Toronto, which just so happens was the former headquarters of the Communist Party of Canada. So they didn’t have to change their posters on the wall.

Doug Monroe:

Being a little obvious there, huh?

Mike Gonzalez:

They bought a mansion in California, and they had some trouble with their 990s. If you’re a 501(c)(3) organization, you have to have a high level of disclosure, which they did not do. I think, if I remember correctly, it was Patrisse Cullors who called the Form 990 racist.

So a lot of people want to do, and actually I just did a long interview on radio on this, people say, “Well, doesn’t that bother you?” I said, “Yeah. No, that bothers me.” But again, Brezhnev, and Stalin, and Andropov, they all had their dachas, their nice houses in the countryside. Fidel Castro died a very wealthy man. This is not new in the history of communism that the people who most push for this will buy mansions.

So I am less interested in the financial dealings than I am interested in what they do to the republic. Now as late as 2022, in April 2022, the Biden administration produce wide-ranging, I think 22 action programs, action items, for the bureaucracy, for all of departments and agencies, in what they had to do to achieve equity, and achieve equity and inclusion and diversity. And we wrote a paper about that.

What was interesting is that night, BLMGNF, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, came out with a statement saying, “This is a really good news. We wholly applaud the Biden administration’s action items. In fact, we have been working with them in writing these action items.” In fact, as according to them, since December 2020, so even a month before Biden into the Oval Office in January 2021, they had been working with the Biden administration in working in these action items that were really wide-ranging. So there’s no need for riots. They’re inside.

How do we combat identity politics?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, we need to deconstruct that. Need to go in and make sure that people, first of all, we need to get the categories off the census. We need to get the categories off of our… And run against the idea of disparate impact. We use the doctrine of disparate impact. That’s why the federal government, obviously, disparate impact come in after the creation of identity politics. Because you need the categories first and then say, “Well, the fact that such and such a law or regulation has a disparate impact that is racial, means that it is racist and we need to get rid of it.”

But the categories themselves are the problem. For example, let’s take African American. If you hive off Nigerian Americans or Ghanaian Americans, they do very, very, very, very well. I think Nigerian Americans have a college graduation rate of 75%, which is much higher than white, even white Americans, but definitely higher than the average American.

One thing they do have is intact families. And we don’t have very good data, but what data we do have demonstrates that Nigerian Americans and Ghanaian Americans, and to some extent as well with Indian Americans, have families that have much more intact. And then when you say, like I just said this in a classroom that I taught at a major university, somebody came back to me and said, “Well, that is the reason why African Americans were non-Nigerian of Nigerian, Ghanaian, is because they’re suffering from the legacy of slavery.” But that is not the case either, because in the 1940s and the 1950s, African Americans had a better rate of family intactness than whites, and they were much closer to slavery. So something must have gone wrong that we need to address. If we do want to get rid of the disparities, we need to address this issue through policy and through society.

But the idea-

Doug Monroe:

Let me stop you there. You’ve hinted in your books about what you think the problem is in that regard with African Americans in the US to the extent there is an issue socially. What are the statistics say?

Mike Gonzalez:

Look, it’s also is a growing issue with-

Doug Monroe:

It’s not just African American.

Mike Gonzalez:

Yeah, with Hispanic Americans-

Doug Monroe:

It’s whites, too.

Mike Gonzalez:

… quote, unquote. It’s with everybody. It’s a colorblind killer. But they say, “No, it’s really a color thing.” But it’s not because of color. It’s because of if you have bad family intactness, you’re just not going to succeed.

People who have followed this issue, there’s something called the success sequence. And if you follow this sequence, if you graduate, get a job, then marry, and they have children, you have a 97% chance of escaping poverty. But you cannot alter any one of these things. You can’t change them around. You can’t say, “Well, I’m going to just have children before I graduate, get a job, and get married.” No, then your chances of poverty increase, and your chances of dysfunction increase.

So my point is these categories are bad. They’re not good for us. They don’t give us good policy. And so we need to get rid of the categories. They’re created by leftists with a leftist purpose in mind. They’re not created to improve the lives of anybody. They’re created to transform society. As soon as we understand this, what I think a conservative president should do is make sure they’re gone from the 2030 census. And let’s do whatever job we need to do to get rid of also of the idea that disparate impact should lead us to policy. Get rid of the discipline of disparate impact.

How should Americans respond to identity politics? 

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, become aware. Get informed. Read me and read people who disagree with me, and compare and contrast. Who has the better ideas? Who has the most challenging solutions? I think becoming informed of the problem, and knowing they have a problem is the first step to towards resolving the problem.

I think Americans need to go back and understand where the problem is. And I think that as a country, we have come close to crisis and it’s only through crisis that you change. And I think that’s the reason why we’re seeing the huge debate of ideas that we’re having now. We have a great war of ideas, and it’s consequential, and it will lead to good things if we keep at it.

My fear is, the fly in the ointment, is that a lot of conservatives are preternaturally afraid of discussing race or sex. And they’re also afraid to discuss climate. But we have to, because these are the fronts in which the other side is fighting.

America’s 2024 Presidential Election and Future of the Country

Mike Gonzalez:

Obviously, it’s a very important election. It will decide a lot. It will decide not just what happens until 2028, but which direction we go in as a country.

We just saw a very disappointing election in Spain, a country I was following very closely, because of my background and the fact that I go there often, in which the conservatives were supposed to win, and they did not win. And they did not win because they were divided over whether you reverse the gains of the left or you accept them, sue for peace, and move on, and just become good stewards of the economy. And that does not work. If you just say, “We’re going to become the good stewards of the economy,” but accept the racial and sexual changes that have happened. And I want to be very clear what I mean by racial changes. I don’t mean, of course, the Civil Rights Act, which I think was a triumph for this country, and desegregation was a triumph, and Brown was a triumph. These are things that the left does not agree on.

I mean the idea that we’re systemically racist. That we’re systemically oppressive. That these things are institutional and structural. We have to reverse those changes. We have to reverse the idea that a man can become a woman, that a man can get pregnant. And of course, the grotesque surgeries that are being practiced on minors which have life-changing events, which these minors do not have the emotional maturity to decide on. We have to change all this and not accept these changes. This will be decided in November 2024.

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