Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the Intersection of Faith and Culture. It's The WallBuilders Show, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton. Later in the program, KCarl Smith will be joining us to talk about Douglass versus Marx. That would be Frederick Douglass versus Karl Marx. It is going to be an interesting interview, a new book coming out. Wallbuilders.com is our main website. That's where you can learn more about us and about all the programs and different events coming up this summer. And then wallbuilders.show if you need to catch up on some of the programs you might have missed last few weeks and months. And then of course, on all the podcast apps out there, share with your friends and family, be a force multiplier and get the truth from the WallBuilders Show in the hands of as many people as you possibly can. Okay guys, so this is an interesting book because it's not a debate that ever actually took place between Douglass and Marx, but it's basically taking their words and just trying to show the two different worldviews, what communism does versus what a biblical worldview does. 

David Barton [00:01:02] Well, you know, it's interesting to me just on the whole worldview thing, because I would go even beyond communism, or at least before communism, go back to Marxism. I think Marxism kind of is a mean form of communism. It's the philosophy that really set up communism to become what it has been, which is destroyer of life, destroyer of freedom, destroy of nations. But the philosophy of Marxism really kind of predates what we know as communism. And I've just been thinking about the influence that Marxism has had on the last two to three generations, particularly the most recent generation, but the one before that and the one before that so that's kind of back into my latter days when I was younger, that it was coming in at that point in time. And it was kind of started as socialism. And socialism is kind of like a soft introductory gateway drug for harder stuff like Marxism. And so, you start with this kind of joint philosophy that you know, society needs to change, it needs to evolve. It all is part of progressivism, and progressivist certainly post-dates Marxism in terms of identification of that movement, but they all go together and they all have to work together, and so if you take Marxism out of that, you certainly have the intellectual underpinnings of socialism, although socialism, it goes all the way back to the book of Genesis, as do all these philosophies. There's nothing new to under the sun, but in our kind of lifestyle, or in our younger American history, I say younger American history, not as old as the Bible, you've got the introduction of Marxism and then you have the growth of socialism. Then you have really the introduction of communism. And then you get so much more than progressivism. But the whole premise of all of those is one thing. And that is that nothing is to remain the same. Everything changes. Everything has to move. Nothing can stay fixed if it stays fixed. It's a drag on society. You have to change everything. Now, the reason I bring that up is having gone through, you know, my background was math and science. That's where my scholarship was in college, et cetera. I just try to reconcile that with things like the laws of gravity or the speed of light or things like, I don't know, even human nature. We haven't seen human nature change in however many thousands of years you wanna point to. It's got the same problems. But I was just saying the laws of thermodynamics, the laws of motion, the loss of electromagnetism, the laws of quantum mechanics, Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Boyle's laws and gasses, Newton's laws of motion. The law of polarity, the law of rhythm, the law of cause and effect, all these laws. You're telling me that everything evolves, that nothing is fixed? I mean, these guys wouldn't even have a universe from which to put out their pablum nonsense if it wasn't for fixed laws that do not change over time. And just coming to reality with that, man, if we could get people to understand that their whole premise is everything always changes, and that's contrary to the laws of nature and of nature's God, we would have a whole different nation if we'd had that philosophy in universities even three generations ago, two generations ago or particularly the current generation. 

Rick Green [00:04:20] Yeah, and I got to admit, guys, I tend to throw all of it into the same box. Like you're saying, it all comes down to a basic rejection of God and making government God and controlling people. But the difference between Marxism and communism, I haven't really made that distinction. I've just always thrown those two in the same bucket and socialism always thought of it as, you know, like you said, the gateway drug to those things. 

Tim Barton [00:04:42] Well, and I think Rick, in fairness, that they are different things, but it's kind of like choosing which gun you want to be shot with. All of them are going to have kind of the same negative consequence. It's just a matter of how you get there. If you live in a Marxist nation, a communist nation or a socialist nation, you're going to lose your property. You're going lose your savings account. You're, you're gonna lose the same general kinds of things. It's, just, you lose them in different ways and different avenues. And, and this is something, Dad, you kind of alluded to, if you track some of the influence of these things in America and the arguments don't really change. In recognizing the, the underpinning worldview problem, it is one of the things we've talked about for years is how in early America, they experimented with socialism. Jamestown experimented was socialism. And by experimenting, they tried it. That was their experiment. They implemented and applied socialism the first couple of years and it led to the starving time. It's the reason, initially early on, Governor Smith passed the law where he said if you don't work you don't eat, which is borrowed from the Bible, 2 Thessalonians 3:10. They were following biblical advice because it wasn't working. Of course, the story of Jamestown unfolds. They removed the governor. They end up having the starving time. They turn to cannibalism. It was a terrible failed experiment and again experiment being relative. They tried it for a couple of years, but they tried to apply socialism and they didn't like the consequence. Similarly, if you look at Plymouth, they tried socialism and again, it was an utter failure. So, socialism has been tried over and over and one of the things that we are told with socialism in general is that the reason it hasn't worked now and this is what the advocates for socialism say is well, we haven't tried it the right way. If we would do it this way, then it would work. And of course, if you ask them, well, how was your new modern version of socialism different than the other ways it's been applied? And they can't really give you an answer, because it's not. This is a broken failed concept from the beginning. Well, Marxism is even worse, because Marxism, is not a voluntary thought. Marxism and communism, some people would argue socialism and communism are more similar. I think Communism -Marxism have more similarities even though they're very different, but it's because it is a mandated created thing ultimately. Now Marxism doesn't start there it ends there, which you could argue the same thing for communism, but both of them are far more intrusive. And mandated and Karl Marx's idea was that ultimately Marxism it's something that should seek to always overthrow the current government. And he said to do that, you at times, you really have to pit classes against each other in the two basic classes where the oppressed and the oppressor. And kind of where Marx landed, he said, sometimes you have to teach people they've been oppressed or they won't seek to overthrow the oppressors. And this is the reality of what we're dealing with. This is what's been going on in academia, not just that people are being taught a socialistic idea that we should redistribute the wealthy individual's money and assets and that we should all be equal together. It's, it's far more evil than that. We are watching academics tell people, tell students that if someone has money, it's cause they're evil and, and therefore you should oppose them. And, and we are literally trying to educate people into believing that they have been oppressed and believing that the moral good is to overthrow the oppressor and at times with great violence. And so, there are unique differences to all of them. All of them end in very negative consequences and outcomes so it all goes the same direction. But many of these things have been tried in America before. They were utter failures. Marxism hasn't been fully tried but Marx is.... At least not in America. Marxism has been fully tried in many other nations, and it led to the deaths of tens of millions of people from those nations. This should be one of those lessons we can look at other nations and learn from their mistakes and not have to make the same ones ourselves. 

David Barton [00:09:03] You know, Tim, going exactly what you're saying, the one thing that struck me about the growth of Marxism in our universities is the decline of the teaching of history. When I checked just a year or so ago, there's not a state in the United States that has an end-of-course test for history, and of course, teachers teach to the test. And if you're not gonna test on history, we're not going to teach history. But if you taught history, then you would know what works and what didn't work. And as you pointed out, Tim. It's never been fully tried in America, but it's never worked in any other place where it has been tried. If we actually studied history, we would know that, and we wouldn't go down the road of three generations of telling people that something's gonna work that never has worked. 

Tim Barton [00:09:40] Yeah, Dad, to that point, it's like saying, well, you know what? Everybody that's ever been shot in the face with a 50 cal has died, but we've never tried it in America and you're like, you're a moron. You're not going to survive that. This is the worst thing ever, but academics don't want to talk about the consequences of what it's produced. They instead want to focus on, no, there's certain really bad people that aren't in the class or category we want, and so we're teaching people they've been oppressed. To help them rise up and overthrow their oppressors. And again, teaching them that violence is an acceptable mean to do this because the greatest moral good is for the oppressed to overthrow the oppressors, et cetera. This is one of the big challenges we are navigating from the academic realm today. 

David Barton [00:10:26] You know, this is a philosophy that goes back to 1840s. And I love the concept that KCarl has done here in the concept that he's taken Marxism from its introduction in 1840 and said, even back at that point, it was rejected. And there were different views of that point as you get with Frederick Douglass. So what a great place to go. What a great way to look at it. Let's go back in history, even to the time this crazy philosophy was introduced. And let's see what the thought was at that time. It's a great wave going at it 

Rick Green [00:10:57] KCarl Smith, our guest, when we return, you're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:12:06] Welcome back to The WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. KCarl Smith, back with us been way too long and man, I saw the sign for your new book. We're at the Liberty Pastors event and I can't think of a better topic than Douglass versus Marx. You put together a debate between these two guys. 

KCarl Smith [00:12:20] I like it. Well, you know, the Douglass and Marx were contemporaries. Both of them were born in 1818, but they never met. So we said, oh, wait a minute now. What would Frederick Douglass, being America's greatest liberty messenger, if he had a face-to-face meeting with Karl Marx, the father of communism, what would he say to him? 

Rick Green [00:12:42] Yeah. 

KCarl Smith [00:12:42] Well, there's no history of that because they never meet. So, we put together this 31 dialogs, where they're in a room, they're going at it. Now, here's the thing that people need to know. The content of what they said is something we did not make up. It's based on source documents. It's based on what Douglass said, what Douglass wrote, his actual beliefs, and the same thing with Karl Marx, his actual belief. So, thank God we have a literary legacy where Frederick Douglass wrote about free speech, the role of government, personal responsibility, private property rights. All the claims of Marxism, Douglass wrote about that before Marxism existed. How so? Well, think about it. The slave master and the slave government, same techniques of oppression. So when Douglass wrote about what he experienced on the plantation as a slave from the slave master is identical to the same techniques of oppression used by Marxism or slave government. So Douglass 

Rick Green [00:13:43] Just tyranny from under a different name. 

KCarl Smith [00:13:45] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, because matter of fact one of Doug is powerful speech his lecture's called The Nature of Slavery and in that speech, Doug has said the first aim of slavery is to take God out of your life. That's the first aim of Marxist.

Rick Green [00:14:01] That's right. Yeah, it's all so it's a no back up you bet you literally took their words, took the topic that they both spoke to or about 

KCarl Smith [00:14:10] Took yes and the claims of Marxism everything because Douglass' is his life in his writing refutes all the claims of Marxism because that's why the left don't lean on Douglass. 

Rick Green [00:14:22] Yeah 

KCarl Smith [00:14:23] Douglass refused everything about Marxism. Douglass talked about our God-given rights. 

Rick Green [00:14:28] Yeah

KCarl Smith [00:14:29] Founding fathers, right? 

Rick Green [00:14:30] Yeah, yeah. 

KCarl Smith [00:14:32] So, the left has no answer for them. So, Douglass is not a museum piece, in my opinion. Douglass is a weapon to defeat Marxism. The sad thing is, most people do not know about that. 

Rick Green [00:14:42] That was actually my next question. Why have we somewhat lost Frederick Douglass? I remember at the State Board of Education a couple weeks ago as part of our arguments was we wanted Frederick Douglass to be one of those guys that we spent more time on in the classroom. And the left hates it because of exactly what you're saying, because he teaches things, because it destroys their arguments. Do you think it's coming back? I mean, it's part of what you are devoted to. 

KCarl Smith [00:15:05] Oh yeah, because... It is coming back because in my book it's not Democrat versus Republican, it's not left versus right, it is good versus evil. You mentioned that the other day when you spoke. It's really good versus evil and people want to know the truth. So thank God we have the literary legacy of Frederick Douglass to refute the false narrative and the claims of Marxism. We just have to be wise enough to leverage that. 

Rick Green [00:15:31] Tell me about the book. And when it's coming out. And... It's already out, okay. 

KCarl Smith [00:15:34] Don't go to Amazon, don't give Bezos any more money. 

[00:15:36] You got it. 

[00:15:37] But come to my website, and it is a little bit long, D-R-L, but it's K Carl, K-C-A-R L dot company dot site, S-I-T-E. 

Rick Green [00:15:49] Okay, do it one more time. 

KCarl Smith [00:15:50] KCarl. K- C-A R-L. KCarl.company.site -S- I-T-E. 

Rick Green [00:15:56] S-I-T-E. So, wait a minute, K-Karl, so see every time I mention my wife's name, Kara, it's always is it a K or a C? And so, with KCarl, it's both. 

KCarl Smith [00:16:06] I gotta get a history on that. So, my given name is Keith Smith. Okay. Keith Carl Smith. And several years ago, my daughter said, Dad, Keith is not a hard enough name. It's not like Rocky. So let's eliminate the last letters off your first name. So, take the K, put it with my middle name, Carl with a C. So publicly, I go by KCarl is one word. 

Rick Green [00:16:28] And how old was your daughter when she came up with this? 

KCarl Smith [00:16:30] She was about 17 years old. 

Rick Green [00:16:33] I love it. Alright, now tell me before we go, what are you going to share with the pastors tomorrow? 

KCarl Smith [00:16:38] Well, I'm going to talk about the essence of if we're going to defeat Marxism, CRT, and DEI, you got to understand first that CRT and DEI are derivative from Marxism. So the best way to defeat Marxism is with Fredrick Douglass'ism. We got to take the liberty message of Fredrick Douglass, which we have now, and take that message, understand it, to articulate the importance and the value of liberty. To the minds of people, because people don't know the truth. They never heard the kind of argument, especially for the writings and life of Frederick Douglass. 

Rick Green [00:17:15] Well, give us a little quick history on Douglas, because I've heard David Barton talk about him quite a bit and give some of the bio, but, I mean, he was incredibly accomplished. He had access to multiple presidents. I mean what were just some of things that he did? 

KCarl Smith [00:17:29] Yeah, David's right on point. Frederick Douglass was an advisor to five Republican presidents. 

Rick Green [00:17:34] Five! 

KCarl Smith [00:17:35] Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, Rutherford Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison. Zero days of formal schooling. He was all homeschooled. He started his own homeschooling program. I'm kidding. To learn how to read and write, because why? He rejected the slave master's common core curriculum that he had set out, so he rejected that, right? 

Rick Green [00:17:51] Common, the slave masters common core curriculum. 

KCarl Smith [00:17:54] So, but the tidbit about Douglass' life that really blows your mind. I remember when David Barton said that, you know, Frederick Douglass wrote three autobiographies. And David said, I don't know, anybody that has three autobiographies, but Frederick Doulgas had three autobiographies because of a different time in his life. But at the time of his death, 1895, Frederick Douglass had $300,000 in savings. That's after being a slave for 20 years, which is equivalent to $10 million today. So that's why the life and the liberty message of Frederick Douglass is the message, the most effective countermeasures to defeat Marxism 

Rick Green [00:18:31] he lived it. He didn’t just theorize... Yeah.

KCarl Smith [00:18:32] You're exactly right. Karl Marx was a theorist about oppression. He never lived it

Rick Green [00:18:36] He was a deadbeat dad. He, you know, did nothing to help his family. He couldn't hold down a job. 

KCarl Smith [00:18:43] That's right. As a matter of fact, in one of the debates we have we came up with, my brother we actually role-played these things, that's how we wrote it. He was Marx of course and I was Douglass. In one of debates Frederick Douglass confronts Karl Marx regarding his lack of work ethic and Frederick Douglass basically said any man that does not financially support his own obligation his family has no need trying to lead a nation. 

Rick Green [00:19:08] Wow, wow. I love it. 

KCarl Smith [00:19:10] So the point I want to bring up before we leave here, so you have these 31 debates. Every debate is followed by a reflection, the moral of the story, talking points. So now you can take this debate and come with these talking points that help you articulate better your view on those subjects. 

Rick Green [00:19:31] Yeah. 

KCarl Smith [00:19:31] And also there are discussion questions with guided answers. It's really a curriculum. 

Rick Green [00:19:35] KCarl, it's such good timing because the, you know, I work with a lot of youth and there is a, there's a fascination with socialism right now. They don't even call it that necessarily, but they're drawn to the same things that Marx was for. And so now's the right time to get this book in front of them and to have the discussion to be able to get them to think through it, not just read the words, but then think through it. I'm so glad you did that part. 

KCarl Smith [00:19:58] And also what it does, it helps them to prepare them. When I, young people go to these college campuses, which is nothing but a Marxist indoctrination boot camp, we got to equip them with the intellectual too. So before they walk in that classroom, and that professor says something, you bring Douglass into the conversation, because Douglass probably wrote about it. 

Rick Green [00:20:19] I love it. As you're saying that, I'm just picturing classrooms all over America on college campuses where we equip these young people and you've got a Frederick Douglass type person sitting in that classroom to counter that. 

KCarl Smith [00:20:29] We can save this nation in one or two election cycles. 

Rick Green [00:20:31] I love it. I love It. KCarl, thank you man. Appreciate you coming on. Thank you for being a part of Liberty Pastors. Folks stay with us. We'll be right back with David and Tim Barton. 

Rick Green [00:21:46] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. Thanks to KCarl Smith. What great work, Douglass Versus Marx: the Battle for America's Soul. I love the last line on the back. It says, this is not a history book. It's a tactical manual for the soul of America. Frederick Douglass has been the answer all along. I, you know, David, I gotta admit, I know I often confess my, the holes in my, in my education here on the program, and I was so utterly unfamiliar with Frederick Douglass until I found you and started listening to your cassette tapes, yes, that long ago, and you would refer to Douglass. And I got so curious about him and the things that you shared and talked about from his faith to his influence on presidents and where he came from. Just the fact that I went to, you know, pretty decent schools, one of the best law schools in America, you know all of those things and was unfamiliar with Douglass tells you how bad the education system is at holding up one of these heroes with these great philosophies. And I know you've been working on textbooks and in a lot of different states. We've got a big battle coming up in Texas, but that was one of the things I heard in the testimony when we went down to the State Board of Education was trying to get Frederick Douglass, you know, back to being highlighted in the textbook. So I thought about that as KCarl was talking about this. So I just want to say thank you to you for constantly finding these heroes, not just in the founding era, but you know here you have what, 50 years after the founding era, this guy coming along and putting out so much great information that we need to be teaching kids today. 

David Barton [00:23:11] But look, how could progressives teach, teach anything about Frederick Douglass because he was an advisor to five different Republican presidents and served in four different Republican administrations. And you can't have a black guy doing that and teach that in class today, even if that is historically accurate. And so what they do teach is how bad he was toward the American flag, but they don't even give the rest of the story on that. That was one of three pieces he did on it in his evolution of life. 

Tim Barton [00:23:37] Well, yeah, Dad, I was going to say, you know, actually, academics do at times talk about Frederick Douglass. They talk about how he acknowledged the Constitution was racist. So they do tell some of things about Frederick Douglass. They just don't tell the whole story about Frederick Douglass. 

David Barton [00:23:53] Yeah. And Tim, to that point, that's he wrote an autobiography when he was young and he was very much in the racist mode because he'd been taught by the Massachusetts Abolition Society and he had been taught the Constitution was anti anti-black, et cetera. And then he says in a second autobiography that he read the Constitution for himself and couldn't find any of that stuff in there. And so, he started not believing in what he was told, even by guys that we would say are on the right side. And That's what, by the time he got to his third autobiography, it's a whole different tone. He's grown over that time, but that never comes out the way academics teach it. 

Tim Barton [00:24:30] Yeah. He acknowledged that because the Constitution allowed slavery, he was taught it's therefore a racist document, but he says when he finally read it, there was not a shred of racism in it that there was nothing of the despicable reference to slaves or slavery. He said, it's a glorious liberty document. You know, the irony when you read the thing that people are criticizing and he believed it cause he was told something incorrect. But again, if you actually knew more of Frederick Douglass' life, you would realize that he's not even the person he's often portrayed to be by academics today. And the reason they don't tell us whole story is because his story contradicts so much of their narrative. And as was pointed out, the fact that when you look at someone who was, didn't have a formal education and yet he was able after slavery, 20 years later, he has $300,000 saved up the equivalent of like $10 million today. His life is the complete contrast and again this is why it you know he's he is the great antonym for some of this Marxist ideology if we just went back and study these guys story whether it's a Frederick Douglass or Booker T Washington whoever else it so contradicts the narrative but Frederick Douglass is a great example because he and Marx having a similar era really gives a good contrast for him 

David Barton [00:25:51] You know, and having started this thing with philosophies at the beginning that didn't work, I want to end it with something. And I think one of the most profound points he made in the interview was he said, remember that Karl Marx was a theorist. He was a theorist. This was all theory to him. It had never before been tried. And now that it's been tried, it's never worked not even once. We got to remember that Marxism came from a theorist who never tried, never applied, never proved anything. And it still hasn't worked even once, so that's a great point too. It violates all the laws of science, it has never worked once, it's got to be rejected. 

Rick Green [00:26:28] KCarl Smith, appreciate him coming on today. Douglass V. Marx is the name of the book and be thinking about it not just as a book to read, but literally like a textbook, like something to teach the family and to study together. That's the way it's written and intended to be used. So appreciate KCarl coming on today. Thank you so much for listening. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.