And we want to thank everybody for being here. We want to thank Chico Alliance Church for having us and hosting us. And once again, don't forget to sign up for ISCA to be a member. And without further ado, I want to introduce my pastor, President of the Institute of Biblical Defense, Pastor of the Trinity Bible Fellowship, Vice President of the International Society of Christian Apologists, Dr. Well, thanks a lot there. Let's go to the Lord in prayer before this message. Father, in Jesus' precious name, we just love you, Lord. And we just pray, Lord, for our country. We pray for our culture. And I just pray, Lord, that you would help us to have the wisdom to stand for your truth, to refute error, to speak the truth in love. But if our culture does fold, I pray that you remind us that your son, the Lord Jesus, still sits enthroned, and that he's still in control, and that whether America remains free or we become declared enemies of the state, I just pray, Lord, that we would recognize that In the end, all we need is your son, Jesus. And so give us the faith and the love for your son that we would be able to suffer persecution if need be. I pray, Lord, that you would anoint me to proclaim your truth and not only rightly divide your word, but to also rightly understand what's going on in the culture today. In Jesus' precious name we pray, amen. One of the best things about the Christian apologetics movement, you know, I did my first debate in 1987, and so I've been at it for a while, and one of the best things about Christian apologetics and the American evangelical Christian apologetics movement is that we defend the essentials of the Christian faith, like God's existence, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, salvation only through Jesus. However, on the downside though, what's happened is that we get an awful lot of younger apologists who will just study the three or four main arguments for essential Christianity and that's all they address. And we do need to debate on college campuses that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead. Unfortunately, there's not enough discussion from Christian apologists about what's going wrong with the culture now that our culture is discarding of the God of the Bible. We're kicking God out of our culture. So the talk that I have today I consider one of the most relevant and important talks that I've been giving. And I've been doing this since the, I mean, In 1989, I think I preached a message on persecution coming to America. But it was 1998 when I presented a paper at the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on the coming death of Western civilization. And it didn't get warm reviews. I represented it in 2015. And all of a sudden, everybody was saying, oh, wow, he's a prophet. And it's like, no, I'm just saying what C.S. Lewis said. in the 1940s and what Francis Schaeffer said in the 1970s. So I do think that we need apologists, not just to debate on the core historical data of the Christian faith, but we also need that prophetic voice where we say, look, this is where we are today. And if we apply these views that we have today, this is where we're gonna be tomorrow, okay? And so if we're not watchmen, if we don't sound the alarm, I don't know who's gonna do that. Ravi Zacharias is a good example of an apologist who spends a significant amount of time talking about cultural apologetics, defending Christianity on the cultural scene. And so I wanna talk about postmodernism, cultural Marxism, and the death of the individual. We're going to have to really rush through postmodernism to get to cultural Marxism, but you can't understand cultural Marxism without postmodernism. But it's postmodernism, cultural Marxism, and the death of the individual. A lot of my recent lectures on cultural apologetics contain the word death, the death of western civilization, the death of truth, the death of the American church, and then this is the death of the individual. There's a reason for this, not just because I'm half Italian and I'm from New Jersey, that I tend to be pessimistic, it's just because if we want to kick God out of America, we want to say God is dead, well guess what, man is dead too. And that's what C.S. Lewis wrote about in his 1940s book, The Abolition of Man. And Francis Schaeffer even talked about the death of man. in his work Back to Freedom and Human Dignity in the 1970s. But here's a brief history of the world view of Western culture, Western civilization. It started in Greek pagan mythology, and you use mythology there in the sense that though it may have taught spiritual truths, they were falsehoods, fairy tale stories. So it's in that sense that I'm using mythology there. You had ancient pagan and Greek mythology, but eventually the Greek philosophers won out. They went to reason and kind of the ancient roots of science. And so this is what I would call today pre-modernism. Now keep in mind before modernism came into existence, Nobody knew that modernism was going to come into existence, so they wouldn't talk about themselves as living in pre-modern times. But with pre-modernism, guys like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle won the debates. And they argued that truth is absolute. There are things that are true for all people at all times in all places, and that truth corresponds to reality. They argued that truth is knowable. Through reason we could really find out about the world in which we live. They said that the universe makes sense. That there's a reality beyond the five senses. Whether it was Plato or Aristotle, they acknowledged certain things like truth and values like goodness and beauty that were real things that really existed. Yet you couldn't weigh them. You couldn't bounce them, you couldn't throw them, and so there's a reality beyond the world of the five senses. Well, this was a good fit for the Christian worldview. When Christianity began to become dominant in the Roman Empire, and around 380 A.D. with Saint Augustine, the Christian worldview embraced these things. And rightfully so, they were consistent with both the Old and the New Testament. And so that was in pre-modern times. Unfortunately what happened was we gained so much confidence in man's ability to reason, okay, because we understood that, that's why all the founders of modern science were Bible-believing Christians, as pointed out by Chris Ashcraft. It was because we believed that a rational God created us in his image so that we have reason, and reason works, and he created the world in a way that makes sense so that through reason we could actually find truth about the world in which we live. That was the one thing the Greek philosophers didn't have. They invented a Logos doctrine. the word. They just said, well, how do we know that our reason is not lying to us? And the world of change, the world of flux, really does make sense and we can understand it. And they said, well, let's call that the Logos. A rational, non-personal mind that enlightens our minds to understand the truth and helps us to make sense out of the physical world. Well, you know, In the first century AD, a Jewish Christian named the Apostle John said, in the beginning was the Logos, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He talked about the Logos enlightening every man. So he's basically saying the Greeks were right about the Logos, that it does exist, but they were wrong in thinking that it was a non-personal mind. It was actually God, the second person of the Trinity. And so all of a sudden we had this confidence. that because we were created by a rational God with reason in his image, with reason that actually works, we could find lots of truth through human reason. And so that started the branches of modern science. Well it led to the point where Rene Descartes who lived in the 17th century AD, he ended up trying to prove everything through reason alone. Now, he was trying to defend God's existence and Jesus' resurrection and things of that sort, but he tried to prove everything through reason alone. He used skepticism as a way to find truth. He said, I'm going to suspend judgment on everything be skeptical about everything until I find something that it's impossible for me to suspend judgment on. And so he kept doubting and doubting and doubting and eventually understood, well, doubting is a form of thinking, and since I'm doubting, I think therefore I am and from that he tried to prove everything else to deduce everything else and I don't think he really succeeded in the project but unfortunately there's a little picture of Rene Descartes mug there and unfortunately this backfired Instead of being a defense of the Christian worldview, it backfired and became the most vicious attack against Christianity. This led to modernism, the attempt to find all truth and solve all problems through unaided human reason. Now Blaise Pascal, let me show you a picture of his mug. These Frenchmen are good-looking guys. He was a contemporary of René Descartes. They're both mathematicians and scientists and philosophers. But Blaise Pascal's response to René Descartes is that, look, if we could find all truth through human reason alone, then there's no need for revelation from God. So what he was actually predicting was, Descartes, you're trying to prove God's Christianity with absolute certainty? This is going to backfire. you're actually going to cause man to believe that Western civilization to believe that we no longer need God. I recommend his work Ponce's where he spells out his own way of arguing for the truth of Christianity. So there's Pascal and he was exactly right. So he started with Christianity is the dominant worldview of Western civilization. That reigned from about 380 AD to the early 1700s. But then as we got more confident about this gift from God called human reason, we started to forget about the gift giver, the rational God. In fact, we started almost worshiping human reason to the point where we started using human reason to argue against God. And so what happened was we started finding natural causes through the study of natural effects. We started finding causes in nature to the point, you know, thunder and lightning isn't really the gods being angry at each other. We could find a natural cause for that and for earthquakes and for diseases. You know, given enough time, I bet we'll find a natural cause for everything. We don't need supernatural causes anymore. So Christianity devolved among the leadership of Western civilization into deism. where God exists but he no longer performs miracles. So that even infected some of the French Jacobin deists, they were anti-Christian deists. The American deists like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, they were pro-Christian deists. They thought Christianity was good to keep order in society and let's further the cause of the Christian church but they themselves didn't believe in miracles and God superseding natural laws. They themselves, though, did believe that you could pray and maybe God could give America the victory over Great Britain by using, working within the natural laws, but they didn't think God could supersede the natural laws. They didn't believe in miracles. Well, what's the difference between an irrelevant God, a God who doesn't perform miracles, a God who doesn't intervene, and no God at all. There's no practical difference. So that eventually gave way to naturalism. We usually call it atheism, where only nature exists, the supernatural realm doesn't exist. But naturalism, if you're a consistent atheist, and most atheists today are not, by the way, but if you're a consistent atheist, then you would realize, well, wait a minute, if there's no God, then there's no truth. There's no morality, there's no meaning in life, and there's no value to human life. And so that's nihilism, kind of nothing-ism. We've lost all purpose, we've lost all reason why we're here. Now, most of the atheist leaders could not face that nihilism. So they wanted to be atheists, they wanted to be naturalists, but they wanted some sense of right and wrong, some sense of meaning. And so the final stage of modernism, with pre-modernism and with Christianity, there's absolute truth, absolute morality, meaning in life. But then when you entered into modernism, you got deism and then naturalism and then nihilism, but modernism started off with the rational individual, the unbiased rational individual all alone in the world, finding all truth and solving all problems through human reason alone. Eventually, reason and truth go out the window, so all you're left with, the final stage of modernism, in my opinion, is existentialism. The individual is still there, but reason is gone. All that's left is the individual and his will. In 2001, J.P. Moreland came up to Bellevue and spoke at a conference that I attended. And he said, with postmodernism, which is the next stage that we're going to talk about, but it would apply equally well to existentialism, if reason and truth are gone, all that's left is shouting. So when you turn on a television set and you see the political debates that are going on, and you find out you can get pepper sprayed in your face, Just for minding your own business, that's because all that's left is shouting now. All that's left is name call. You disagree with some people, they just call you names. You're a racist, or a bigot, or whatever it may be. Because reason and truth have been thrown out the window. If someone's your political enemy, if you can't dig up dirt on them, you just make stuff up. Because reason and truth doesn't matter anymore. All that's left is shouting. But with existentialism, at least you had the individual left. and the individual's will, okay, but there is no more reason or truth. So in other words, man desperately needs meaning in life, but if there is no God, there's no truth, there's no morality, no meaning. So all you got is your will, so you actualize yourself, you create meaning for your life. because we so desperately need it. Existentialism failed, so even the individual died, and that's what we'll be talking about, post-modernism, cultural Marxism, and the death of the individual. Marxism grew out of modernism as well, and we'll talk a little bit about what traditional economic Marxism was. But there's Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist. There's two ways you can look smart. I'm the kind of guy, I've taken some debates against guys with Australian or British accents. And I sound like a New Jersey cab driver. I also probably don't look real smart. I had one guy tell me once he found out I was a pastor, he said, oh, you're a pastor? And I said, yeah. He said, well, you don't look like one. I said, well, what do I look like? And he didn't answer me. He didn't want to say it. He goes, I don't know what it is that I look like. But there's two ways to make people think you're smart. Number one. Do the hard work, do your study, do your homework. The other way, just buy a pipe. You don't even have to smoke anything. You just walk around with a pipe. It works for atheists and Christians. C.S. Lewis had to smoke the pipe, made him look smart. So if I ever debate a guy and he's got a pipe, I'm just... I'm just gonna sit down, man, it's over, I'm toast. But Jean-Paul Sartre, he was an existentialist. He said, look, there's no God, no truth, no morality, no meaning, but we desperately need those things. So man is free to create his own truth, create his own morality, and create his own meaning. You actualize yourself. Jean-Paul Sartre went so far to say, and this is the absurdity of atheism, he went so far to say, this is the last ditch of modernism's attempt. to salvage the individual was existentialism. He had the individual in his will, but he went so far as to say all that matters is that you actualize yourself. It doesn't matter if you help the elderly lady across the street or you mug her and steal her groceries. The important thing is you actualize yourself, you gave meaning to your life. Okay, you tell me that's not weird, okay? But that's what they're trying to do is salvage the individual without God. It can't be done. If God is dead, man is dead too. Friedrich Nietzsche, German atheist, he was a nihilist. He understood if God is dead, truth is dead, morality is dead, meaning is dead, okay? If my wife let me grow a mustache, that's what I would look like right now. And I like his mustache, not his thought. But Friedrich Nietzsche, so he said, the death of God, he argued for the death of God, truth, morality, and meaning, and then this would lead to the Superman. In other words, he was looking for a group of men. Remember, the individual's dead now. So he's looking for a group of men to arrive with the courage through their will to power, because there's no truth. All that's left is power. Through their will to power, they're going to create their own hard values, because Nietzsche didn't like the soft values of Christianity, like grace and mercy and love. He glorified war and hard values. He believed Christianity held back. Christianity was a myth, a false myth that held back human progress and human sexuality and things of that sort. And so he wanted a new breed of supermen with the courage through their will to power to create their own truth, their own morality, and their own meaning. And then to force that on everybody else through their will to power. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, he said, look, if God is dead, truth is dead, morality is dead, meaning is dead, then man is dead too. Must reading. When you watch the news and you see how bad things are getting, you can't understand it, because the choice is really God or insanity. The choice for a culture. And guess what? We chose insanity. It doesn't make sense anymore. This is the abolition of man. We're dehumanizing man. And Macias Lewis talked about in his work in the 1940s, just because in a grammar textbook For elementary school students in Great Britain, they were teaching moral relativism, which right for you is right for you, doesn't have to be right for me, vice versa, denying God's moral absolutes. C.S. Lewis said this is going to lead to the abolition of man, where the few, the man-molders of the new age, will control the billions. and they'll treat human beings as sub-humans, and they'll use science and education, not to educate people and teach truth, but they will be used as tools to enslave the masses, to put themselves in power and to keep themselves in power. And we see this today, that through certain people's will to power, certain politicians can get away with murder, and other politicians, you don't have to do anything wrong, they'll make up stuff against you. And it's just kind of like, if I don't believe in truth or reason, my narrative, my story, you know, we had a vice presidential candidate, I mean, a presidential candidate, that said, something along the lines, we believe in truth, not the facts. And people laughed because they thought he just made a mistake. He didn't make a mistake. That's a postmodern worldview. It's like saying, me and my community, we have our own narrative, our own truth. We don't really believe it's true. We want it to be true. And so our community has its truth. And no amount of facts will change our minds. Okay, so the debates today are not about facts. It's really, really sad. You present fact after fact after fact. I'll just give you one example, way off topic, but gun control. If that's your narrative, if that's your truth, we need more gun control, then the facts are irrelevant. The fact that 97.8% of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones, where you have gun control already, Don't ever let the facts change your truth. And that's what we have. So science and education, it just basically protects the politically correct, this anti-Christian agenda. And the facts just don't really matter. Francis Schaeffer wrote about the death of man in the 1970s. Schaeffer didn't even need a pipe, man. That dude looked smart. Now post-modernism is kind of a reaction against modernism. Because modernism failed to find absolute truth and solve all man's problems, sure we might find cure for certain diseases, but we also find dozens of ways to blow the planet up. Okay? So reason is not our savior. Contrary to the French Revolution where they had a statute to Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom, no, reason is not our savior. It failed. So postmodernism is a reaction against modernism. You have guys, again, the pipe. Guys, the pipe. Okay? If your wife says, oh, you don't know anything, just pull out a pipe. What's she going to say? You can't argue with that. The hairstyle's irrelevant. You got a pipe, you're good. Jacques Derrida. How come all these guys are French? Either Germans or French, but whatever. Of course, they're brilliant thinkers, but if you use your brilliant mind against God. You could lead a culture down the tubes, and that's what these guys did. Well, here's an example of a postmodernist. They reject absolute truth. They say there's no meta-narrative, no true story above other stories to determine whether a community's story or narrative is true. And they reject human reason's ability to find truth. Truth is relative to one's community. In other words, an individual is lost. The individual is dead. The individual is gone. The individual is defined solely as part of its community. Okay? I'll give you an example of it. My students laugh because I accidentally gave them the same example three or four times, but just outside of the University of Washington, some Antifa people, were out there, little Antifa people wearing their masks, and not all Antifa people are little, but these ones were, these three or four, and there were three... Guys just walking down the street wearing ball caps and t-shirts and blue jeans, minding their own business a couple blocks outside of UW, University of Washington, and they pepper sprayed these guys in the face. It's on YouTube. And one of these guys, his reaction was he threw a left hook and knocked a little Antifa person down. And the Antifa people freaked out. They said, why did you do that? Why did you do that? And this guy said, because you hit me. Neither side could understand each other. Now that's a true story, but that is also a metaphor for the clash of two cultures. The culture that's on the way out. Now I don't know that these guys were Christians and all, but they grew up in an America that was dominated by the Christian worldview, so they believe that there's such a thing as individual rights. These are big, strong-looking guys. They don't look like they lift weights, but they look like big, strong guys. A lot bigger than me, not as big as Dan. So it's probably right in between the two of us. That's tall. But these guys are just like, look, man, I just want to be left alone. You can't just walk up and pepper spray me in the face. And the other side was like, well, wait a minute. We're in a community, and our narrative says you are the oppressor class. So it's irrelevant whether you're nice to people or mean to people. You're an oppressor, as defined by our community. And we're the oppressed. So when we pepper spray, you're either supposed to say thank you or just keep on walking and know that, hey, I had it coming because of the way they define me and, I guess, what my ancestors supposedly did. But what I'm getting at here is the individual rights are gone. Okay? Postmodernism focuses on beauty, mystery, narratives, you know, stories. Focuses on meanings, the feelings, the will. Denies absolute morality. There's a heavy emphasis on tolerance. Okay? But keep in mind the way they define tolerance. Traditional tolerance meant freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Okay? So you could yell at your neighbor, you're going to hell if you don't accept Jesus. I wouldn't do that, but you could do that. And your neighbor could yell at you, you're going to hell if you don't accept Allah and Muhammad as his prophet. And you could argue all day long, but if neither one of you breaks a law, you know, you could share lunch together. Okay? That's traditional tolerance, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. The new tolerance says this, all beliefs are equally true. And all behavior is equally wholesome. Oh, by the way, if you disagree with us, we can't tolerate you. You're a racist, you're a hater, you deserve to be locked up. So in the name of tolerance, the new tolerance has become the most intolerant belief system in the history of mankind. They reject dichotomous thinking, like either or. They say, no, no such thing as truth and falsehood. No such thing as right and wrong. However, they do divide people subconsciously into postmodernists and non-postmodernists, and they think we're wrong. They reduce all authority to power. Traditionally we viewed authority as someone who has earned the right to be heard. Each one of the speakers here, whether the general sessions or the other, hopefully they have the authority. Hopefully I have the authority to be heard because I've done my homework. They've done their homework. But if you reduce all authority to power, It's not the right that you've earned the right to lead, it's just that you have the raw power to lead and you're going to force your will on others. This is Nietzsche's will to power, okay? And then instead of rational arguments, you have power narratives, okay? So who cares about the facts as long as your story, your community's narrative, has the power to move people's hearts and then you could care less about rational arguments. So they argue that we create our own reality through language rather than language trying to point us back to reality. They deconstruct text like Girida. He wrote this article that where he argued that, The reader has as much right to the meaning of the text as the author. So another philosopher responded to him by refuting a whole bunch of stuff that Derrida never argued for. Derrida responded by saying, I never said that stuff. Then the guy responded to Derrida, the reader has as much right to determine the meaning of the text as the writer. And Derrida had no response. They want to deconstruct the Bible. You know, turn Jesus into a Marxist or a postmodernist or a gay activist or whatever. They want to deconstruct the Bible, but they don't want you deconstructing their text. And then one of the children of postmodernism, political correctness. Political correctness means there's no debate. Okay? You say, well, I don't believe in abortion because I think abortion is murdering an unborn child. No, no. Abortion is a woman's right. Civil woman, civil right, she has the right to do with her body with what she chooses. End of debate. It's not supposed to go any further. If it goes any further, they're just going to shout at you and say you're anti-woman. The problems with post-modernism, we're going to run through it real quick, it's self-refuting. The statement, there is no absolute truth, The only way that could be true would be if it's an absolute truth. So it has to be false. So there is absolute truth. Then they might say, well, maybe man can't know truth. Well, how do you know the truth that man can't know truth? So absolute truth exists and man can know it. Then they would basically say, no such thing as right or wrong. Well, they're saying it's wrong to call any action wrong. It's like, well, you Christians are wrong to want your morality taught in the public schools. No, wait a minute. Why? Because there's no such thing as right and wrong. Well, there's no such thing as right and wrong. Christians are never wrong. Leave us alone. Then they reject moral absolutes while creating new moral absolutes. So it used to be that they would say each person decides what is right or wrong for himself or herself. Now they get to the point where if you're not pro the gay agenda, pro gay marriage, or pro this or that. So if you're a baker and you serve all kinds of people, heterosexuals and homosexuals, but you decide not to cater a gay wedding, you can lose your business. Now right now, we're winning those cases at the Supreme Court level. But until it gets to that point, Christians are free in this country. We're just not quite as free as anybody else. In fact, the only people group that has less freedom than Christians right now in America are unborn babies. Their right to life isn't even accepted. So they're creating new moral absolutes. There's actually a book, and I can't remember the name of the author. It's called The New Absolutes. William Watkins. And then The New Tolerance by Josh McDowell. Two good books, written in the 90s. They knew what was coming down. And then they say that the typo there should be, if language doesn't touch reality, then their language doesn't touch reality. And then postmodernism, while rejecting the metanarrative, has become its own metanarrative. Postmodernism fails to give any reason to be postmodern. Why do I say that? Because they don't accept reason. So if they gave reasons why you should be postmodern, they would be actually shooting themselves in the foot. And then while proclaiming tolerance, the postmodernist cannot tolerate any non-postmodernist. OK, talk a little bit about Karl Marx. He kind of precedes postmodernism, but we need to look at his modernistic ideology, because the cultural Marxists have postmodernized Marxism. He held to what is called dialectical materialism. He believes only matter existed, and that there's a truth, took it from Hegel, who was an idealist, he wasn't a materialist, but whatever the case, there'd be a truth, and it wouldn't be absolute truth, it wouldn't be eternal truth, there'd be the antithesis, the thesis, the antithesis, and they would be synthesized to form a new truth. And so he believed in economic determinism, the economic issues determine the future. He believed in class struggle, that the workers should revolt against the business owners, that private property should be abolished, that the family should be abolished, that religion should be abolished. So he thought This is economically determined. Eventually, you're going to have the classless society, okay? But before that, you've got to get the dictatorship of the working class, dictatorship of the proletariat. That's going to happen, but we can speed it up. through the workers revolting against the business owners. He believed in free government education for all children. Why did he want the government in charge of education? He wanted to indoctrinate them in socialistic ideas. He believed in a progressive and graduated income tax to redistribute the wealth, to take from the rich to give to the poor. Well, people who get wealthy, the 1%, most wealthy people in America, that 1% keeps changing. So some people drop out of it and new people drop in because they have the freedom. Like Bill Gates wasn't always in the 1%. But you keep attacking, taking from the producers and giving to the non-producers, eventually you encourage everybody to be non-productive. He wanted a national bank. Basically, pretty much all the things we have in America today is what he wanted. Now here's where cultural Marxism comes into play. Before World War I, Marxists believed that if war started in Europe, the working class would revolt against the business owners. But that didn't happen. Instead, the working class went to war for their countries. They didn't revolt. So these guys were like, what in the world? Our philosophy is false, it failed? So after World War I, Marxists tried to figure out why the working class did not revolt. You get guys like the Italian guy, Antonio Gramsci, and then you get George Lukacs, who believed that Western democracy and capitalism would have to be destroyed before the revolution, okay? And there's a picture of Antonio Gramsci, okay? He was Italian. I'm half Italian. This is where I get my good looks from. If you wonder why I get my hair cut like this, that's what it would look like if I let it grow. But Antonio Gramsci, he believed religion was too strong in the West. He said, Marx, Karl Marx, you're right. Religion is the opium of the people. It's the drug, the narcotic, that prevents the workers from revolting. But Karl is really good opium. Okay? And so he believed religion was too strong in the West. So instead of revolution, attaining the Marxist goals through revolution, you've got to attain them through evolution. Western civilization has to gradually be transformed. You need to infiltrate religion. You need liberation theologians who claim that Jesus was the greatest Marxist revolutionary who ever lived. You've got to transform. Jesus into a Marxist. You've got to infiltrate the media, take over the media, take over education, and take over politics. We've got to understand, the classless society, utopian dream of Karl Marx, that's never going to come about. His view really brings us to the dictatorship of the proletariat, a socialistic regime. And supposedly, when we have socialistic regimes and dictatorships in every country in the world, then the powerful dictators are going to give up their power and we'll have a classless society. I don't think that's going to happen there, Karl Marx. And so all this cry for socialism while trying to distance themselves from Marxist communism, that's a lie. This goes hand in hand. So Gramsci was an Italian Marxist. He was imprisoned by Mussolini and died in prison in 1937. The Frankfurt School, George Lukacs tried to attack the family unit and Christian morality. So you've got to understand, cultural Marxism at its core, just like Enlightenment rationalism and modernism and existentialism, at its core it was anti-Christian. They wanted to topple Western civilization because Western civilization was so influenced by the Christian worldview. This is why the political left that has almost nothing in common with Muslim terrorists, but they will work side by side with Muslim extremists, Even though they disagree about gay rights and women's rights and things like that and religious tolerance, they disagree on those issues, what do they share in common? It's kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. They both want to topple Western civilization. So they're using each other. The political left thinks once we knock off Christianity, then we can knock off the Muslims. The Muslims think once we knock off Christianity, then we can knock off the political liberals. But it's an attack on western civilization. Lukács promoted sexual immorality to destroy society in Hungary. He referred to this as cultural terrorism. There's a picture of him, looks a little like Rodney Dangerfield with glasses. He encouraged presenting sexually explicit material to children in education. All that will never happen here in America. It's been going on for decades. His views were rejected and he had to flee from Hungary. Good for Hungary. 1923 he went to Frankfurt, Germany to meet with other cultural Marxists and that's where they started the Frankfurt School. Fellow Marxist Felix Wiel financed the new Marxist think tank. In 1930 Max Horkheimer combined the psychological thought of Sigmund Freud with Marxism. Now, because of that, everyone, not just the workers, but now everyone was psychologically oppressed. Out of economic oppression, now everyone and their little oppressed groups are psychologically oppressed by Western leaders, which would then encourage everybody to overthrow the Western leaders. When the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933, the Marxists, many of whom were Jews, fled to New York City. So they were over, too. Number one, they were Jews. The Nazis hated the Jews. Number two, they were Marxists. And the Nazis were national socialists, not international socialists like the socialists were, like the cultural Marxists. So there was a butting of heads there. But people who think socialism is a good thing, Just the Nazi form of National Socialism was still Socialism. Fascism of Italy, very close to Socialism. In fact, Antifa, they think they're anti-fascist. You talk to them about their economic views and their political views, they're fascist. But we'll see where that came in, where an Orwellian redefining of terms. So then the Frankfurt School came to New York City and took residence in Columbia University and began to change. government-run schools in America and the curriculum. They developed critical theory. This view criticized every pillar of Western society. The family unit, gotta break it down. Let's promote gay marriage, let's promote premarital sex, whatever, but we gotta bring down every pillar of Western society. The family, democracy, basically by that, we're actually a constitutional republic. But they actually mean freedom, political freedom, Christianity, freedom of speech, traditional morality, capitalism, free enterprise. Everybody acts like, oh, capitalism is caused by greed. No, look, we're already greed. We're already greedy. Now the question is, what economic system works best with greedy people? Well, in capitalism, two guys compete for my business. So I get a better product at a better cost. And then if they do good in their business, they create jobs, and people get more jobs. In socialism, you get the power-hungry government officials who got all the guns, and then they get to determine. how to redistribute the wealth. And that doesn't turn out very well. Really good book, you want to find out really, The Case Against Socialism by Rand Paul. Pot off the presses, The Case Against Socialism by Rand Paul. So these guys, critical theory of cultural Marxism, criticized every pillar of Western society. There's the Frankfurt School you have. Theodor Adorno authored The Authoritarian Personality. He condemned traditional American views about gender roles and American views of sexuality as prejudice. He labeled these views fascist. So if you believe homosexuality is a sin, two guys want to get married, have a bogus wedding down the block, I don't think there's anything I can do to stop that. I just want to be left alone, okay? But they act like, no, no, you're a fascist, because you call gay marriage a sin. And so anybody who disagrees, if you say that, no, if you're biologically a male, then you're a male, even if you identify as a female, okay, you're a fascist. So they redefine the word fascist as anybody who disagrees with them. Cultural Marxism shifted away from economic oppression to psychological oppression, and America was divided into two groups, the oppressors and the oppressed. And so males of European descent are the oppressors. I don't know when I became a white guy, okay? Just a personal note. In the early 1990s, when I debated white Aryan supremacists, I was not considered a white guy. As a half-Italian, half-Portuguese, the grandson of immigrants on both sides, I was kind of darker-skinned Western Europeans. That's why the Ku Klux Klan used to be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But somewhere along the line, all Americans of European descent were grouped together and supposedly were the oppressors, were the evil ones that have to be defeated to bring down Western civilization. Gender and social roles of men and women were defined by the oppressors. All those evil oppressors telling a little girl that she's a girl. and gender distinctions don't really exist, they're simply a social construct that needs to be overturned. Herbert Marcuse, he wrote Eros, you know the Greek word for sexual love, Eros and Civilization in 1955. He promoted sexual freedom outside traditional Christian morality and Christian outside of marriage. This book had a great influence on the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Marcuse identified the oppressed class as minorities, women, and homosexuals. This led to many of the protests of the 1960s. Remember in the 1960s you had Martin Luther King Jr. taking Christian principles and saying men and women should not be judged by their skin and their outward appearance, but by the character of their being. But this led to more radical movements like the Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Movement, and radical feminism. You know, Bible-believing Christian ladies started the women's rights movement in the early 1900s, but it was taken over by anti-man, lesbians, Wiccans, socialists. The gay rights movement, sexual liberation, Marcuse's work led to an awful lot of this. It was the political ideology behind it. He defined liberating tolerance as tolerance of any views from the extreme left, cultural Marxism, but rejection of any traditional views. This is political correctness. What he called liberating tolerance is actually political correctness. where we tolerate anybody who agrees with us. So it's like freedom of speech. We will protect your freedom of speech as long as you say what we want you to say. We find anything you say offensive, and then we're going to clamp down on you. Let me tell you, we never needed freedom of speech for compliments. If I compliment you, you're not gonna want to see me in prison. You're not gonna punch me in the nose. So freedom of speech means you have the freedom to say offensive things. Now we as Christians should police ourselves through the word of God and by the Holy Spirit and not try to offend people. Sometimes the gospel just offends people. So be it. We speak the truth in love. But this idea that anybody that offends me, that's not speech that's protected. The whole political correctness movement. Saul Alinsky, he was a devoted disciple of cultural Marxism. His work, Rules for Radicals, was a practical guide for community organizers to promote his views. No longer was it like, we want the philosophy professors. They got them. They got all the leaders and stuff. But now we've got to go grassroots and get community organizers. You could be a community organizer and pave a path to seats of power, even to the White House. So his Rules of Radicals was a practical guide for community organizers to promote cultural Marxism. He has influenced the thought of many politicians. There's the cover of his book Rules for Radicals. So cultural Marxism has a hatred for traditional Christian values. It has a divide and conquer strategy. Divide people into different tribes, different groups warring with each other. And so it's a divide and conquer strategy because Western civilization is so strong. So it produces tribalism and attacks the family unit. and it's an attempt to overthrow society through their views. People are not judged by their individual character. They're judged by the group that they are in. So the guys walking down a street in Seattle, Washington, they get pepper sprayed in the face. It's irrelevant what their individual character is. You're either an oppressor or the oppressed, that's critical race theory, the individual dies. Doesn't matter how nice you are, there is no salvation, there is no redemption for you if you're in an oppressor group. If you're in the oppressed camp, you can get away with anything because your community has that built-in protection. And so the individual and individual rights die. So the critical race theory, the oppressors versus the oppressed, systemic racism. You're automatically a racist if you fall into certain categories, even if you're the nicest person on the planet Earth. Even if you love all people with the love of the Lord, that's irrelevant. It's systemic among your people group. You're in an oppressor group. So the oppressors versus the oppressed, systemic racism. And then intersectionality. If you're female, That's one oppressed group. A minority, another oppressed group. Gay, another oppressed group. And non-Christian, another oppressed group. You're four for four. You don't have to know anything about what you're talking about. You got a lot of power there. Now, if you're a European-American male, who happens to be Christian, heterosexual, I mean, right there, you're 0 for 3. And so that's the way they group these things together right now. Dietrich von Hildebrandt, I'm wrapping things up now, he said true community, he was a Roman Catholic philosopher who opposed Hitler. When the Nazis came to power, he fled to Austria. When they took over Austria, he fled to Europe. When they took over Europe, he fled to America and taught at Fordham until he died a philosopher. He said true community can only be found in Christianity because the Christian view of the individual, we're all created in God's image, so human life is sacred. but we're all fallen and in need of salvation, but Jesus died on the cross for all mankind. So human life is sacred and there has value. We deserve human rights as being humans. And so true community is only found in the church, the body of Christ, which acknowledges the worth of the individual. So the ultimate apologetic Francis Schaeffer would say, John 13, 35, the world will know that you're my disciples by the love you have for one another, okay? And we gotta show the world, if we could stop fist fighting in the church, maybe the world will want what we've got. The church is the only true community. All these other things are satanic deceptions, pseudo community. Collectivism is godless systems like post-modernism, Marxist communism, cultural Marxism, national socialism, international socialism, fascism. They can never produce true community. They only produce collectivism where the individual is only important as part of their group. So if your group's an oppressor, you get the pepper spray. If our group is the oppressed group, you're not allowed to punch us back. And again, it's the collectivism is the death of the individual. So even many non-Christian thinkers do not want to see Christian values eradicated from American society. In other words, there are even non-Christians now that are arguing, please don't trash Christianity because the consequences are going to be the concentration camps and the gulags. Don't trash Christianity. Jordan Peterson is a Jungian psychologist. He believes the Bible is just a bunch of fairy tales, but they're fairy tales that teach us truth, and that's where we got our whole idea of human rights and individual freedoms from. And he thinks if we trash Christianity, it's going to be the concentration camps and the gulags. So he's not a believer. Now pray for him. Because if you ask him, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead? He said, it doesn't fit in my worldview, but who am I to say, I don't know. Okay, pray for him, but he is not a Christian. Now he can help some of our kids when they go to college, if they watch his YouTube videos, it might help keep them in the fold, but be careful that he doesn't become a cult leader, and they just worship, nobody gets to heaven by worshiping Jordan Peterson. but he's just an example of a guy who's saying, we gotta stop cultural Marxism, and the only way to do it is by encouraging the Christian worldview. He's like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Christian beliefs are beneath me, but boy, it sure helps us keep order in society and have freedom and prosper as a culture. And David Horowitz, he was a former cultural Marxist in the 1960s. He's Jewish, he's an agnostic, he's not even sure that God exists, yet he just wrote a book the dark agenda the left's war on Christianity. And he dedicated it to his Christian friends. And he's arguing we've got to defend our Christian friends if Christianity goes down the tubes in America, America's toast. There's Jordan Peterson. There's David Horowitz. Courageous guys. We need Christians like Robbie Zacharias to stand in and make a cultural defense of Christianity. Believe me. Hundreds of millions were slaughtered in the 20th century because of secularism and Marxism. With cultural Marxism and post-modernism in the 21st century, billions will be slaughtered if Christianity goes down in America. And so we need to do a better job defending it. Now let me say this. If the cultural Marxists win our culture, you just remember that our king still sits on the throne. He is still the Lord of Lords and the King of Kings. And when the time is right, he will come off the throne and the cultural Marxists will wish he stayed on the throne. Because when he comes off the throne, you know, King David said, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make thine enemies a footstool for your feet. The day will come when the Lord Jesus will return and make things right on the planet Earth. Until that point, let's stand up for truth, but remember, in the end, it would be nice if we could defend America and defend freedom, okay, and defend liberty, but in the end, what it all comes down to, even if America is toast, defending and sharing the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. I live to defend Jesus. He's my king. The Bible promises to meet all my needs, but if I understand the Bible correctly, in the end, all I need and all you need is Jesus. God bless you.