Episode 159: “Marxism’s Long March” with Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe

America is waking up to the capture of our institutions by the “progressive” woke Left. Beginning with K-12 education, universities, the media, and Hollywood, it’s now moved into many churches, our military and corporate boardrooms. This didn’t happen overnight. In this wide ranging and thoughtful conversation with Mark Meckler and Eric O’Keefe, we explore its roots going back to an obscure Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci writing in the 1920’s and his strategy to gain control of cultural institutions. Eric explains that “Gramsci called it ‘the long march through the institutions.’” It took 100 years, but now it’s arrived. We also look at one of the drivers of the American Revolution: the contempt that elites in London held for Americans, even the successful ones. ==== Guests: Mark Meckler, one of America’s leading grassroots activists, founder of Citizens for Self Governance, Convention of States, co-founder of the Tea Party Party Patriots and interim CEO of Parler. and Eric O’Keefe who chairs the Convention of States, co-founded U.S. Term Limits and the Wisconsin Club for Growth and a long time leader in the movement to re-establish citizen control of government. ==== Of grave concern to all of us is the ability of conservatives to communicate with each other through social media. Mark shares his experience as interim CEO of Parler, the social media company which was put out of business by Amazon. “What happened to Parler is, I think much more serious than most people understand,” warns Mark. “Not only was Parler taken down, all the ancillary services that are required to be alive on the web, to have a presence on the web, disappeared as well.” So sue Amazon? Amazon spends over a billion dollars a year in legal fees and was utterly unconcerned by any Parler lawsuit. Another looming issue is what Mark calls the “tech stack”, the complex array of “many, many more layers, another 5, 10 layers below that of technical infrastructure that's required for any business or organization to exist in any sort of scale on the web.” There’s a lot of importance in this episode - Eric’s chilling John Doe experience after defending Scott Walker, the Convention of States, Merrick Garland’s attempt to chill parents speech, ways to cut the Administrative State down to size, and more - I hope you’ll find the time to listen in.