An activist at a recent anti-Israel march performed a valuable service when he revealed what the real goal of the protest was. Spoiler alert: it was not “liberating” Gaza, a speck of land that most of today’s radicals would have trouble finding on a map.

Remonstrating with a young YouTuber asking questions at the protest, the activist said, “You’re not doing this for what the actual conversation is, which is getting rid of this country.”

The assertion was so outlandish that at first it did not seem to compute for the YouTuber, who asked in an incredulous tone, “Getting rid of this country?”

The activist set him straight: “Getting rid of America, getting rid of the West. This is what this is for,” he said, motioning toward the demonstrators. “Yes. Everyone here understands that at some level we need to get rid of America completely.”

The activist further expounded on the need for “decolonization,” giving “land back” (supposedly to Native American tribes in this country), and abandoning “capital itself.”

>>> EVENT: NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It

Elon Musk posted the video on his platform X last week, commenting, “Most reasonable people, because they are reasonable, cannot believe that the goal of the far left is to end America.” 

Thanks to Musk, more people now know. The post got nearly 40 million views.

Katharine Cornell Gorka and I have written a book that explains precisely why it is that so many people all of a sudden want to get rid of the United States (or at least how it’s constituted), and how they conceal this urge behind other crusades, be they about race, sex, climate, ableism, or, as in this case, Palestinians.

The book’s title is NextGen Marxism, What It Is and How to Combat It. Its mission is to make sense of all the bizarre and seemingly unconnected phenomena that bedevil Americans today, and provide an explanation as to who’s behind it and, most importantly, why.

We call the causes of the present fever gripping America NextGen Marxism because it is at its base the cultural Marxism that emerged in Europe in the middle of last century, combined with some deeply contemporary American pathogens, such as community organizing, the manipulation of queer and gender theory and, above all, racial grievances, and the use of international networks and social media.

To be sure, it is still the same old disastrous, disgraceful Marxism. It still seeks the abolition of the family, the nation-state, private property, and God. It still reduces all human relations to a conflict between the oppressed and their oppressors. It would still lead to penury and gulags.

Today, its practitioners seek to dismantle, or at least unrecognizably alter, the experiment that Abraham Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.” America remains exactly that. For this reason alone, NextGen Marxists must be thwarted, just like an earlier generation of Americans defeated the Soviet attempt to communize the U.S. and, in time, the Soviet Union itself.

The cultural Marxists of the mid-20th century had already changed some of the key elements of the Marxism that Karl Marx laid down, so much so, in fact, that many old-style communists refuse to recognize this new Marxism as a member of the family.

The old Marxism emphasized economics. The industrial worker would be constantly rising to overthrow capitalism in bloody revolutions, Marx wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848.

In Capital, his 1867 magnum opus, Marx wrote that workers were “the class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes.”

Except none of that proved true. The industrial worker was simply not interested in revolution or overthrowing the state. Contra our Gaza demonstrator, the worker liked his homeland, God, his family, and what property he had. Workers were proud of what they produced at the factory.

After the Russian Revolution and the installation of the Soviet state in 1917—the first successful communist revolution in the world—German and Italian ideologues tried to replicate it in their countries, but German and Italian workers took a pass, preferring capitalism and parliamentary democracy.

Marxist intellectuals began to ask themselves, why? How could Marx have been this wrong?

>>> How Marxist Left Captured Higher Education

Their answer was that the worker had “false consciousness.” Their revolutionary awareness needed to be raised through interventions. Cultural institutions needed to be infiltrated so that people could be indoctrinated into a new way of looking at and thinking about reality.

These ideas flowered here in the U.S. in the 1960s, and, as Gorka and I write, the radical students of that decade began to take over the institutions in the 1980s, beginning in the academy in the humanities faculties and building from there.

These professors have taught their young charges that they live in an oppressive society, one that we must get rid of, as the Gaza demonstrator said. As Gorka and I explain, the architects of Black Lives Matter all speak in these terms because they were indoctrinated into this poison from their teenage years. They use race, and the racial guilt prevalent among some whites, as a cudgel.

Sex is used, too. We now have a new verb, “to queer.” It is for those “who see the task of queerness as the dismantling such institutional norms.”

A 21st-century element of NextGen Marxism is the nexus of connectivity between social media and Marxist networks that span the globe. Years before she founded BLM, for example, Alicia Garza boasted that she had helped set up a U.S.-based affiliate of these networks after global Marxists called on their American counterparts to weaken U.S. power from within.

Only by understanding how we got here, and the seriousness of the current cultural crisis, will Americans know what must be done to defeat today’s enemy. If Gorka and I reach one sliver of Musk’s millions with our book, we’ll be content.