ExclusiveSpread of Marxism Ideology is Undermining the U.S. Military | Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier | Focus Talk

Hi, welcome to Focus Talk. Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier was the commander of a missile warning unit in the United States Space Force until he published his book, Irresistible Revolution, Marxism's Goal of Conquest and the Unmaking of the American Military. That was May 2021. He was removed from his post and later separated from the Army. Today we invite him to come talk to us about the spread of Marxism in the U.S. military and its impact. Hi Matt, great to see you and thank you for coming to our show. I'm happy to be here on your show, Jenny. Thank you. Thank you. So Matt, I wanted to ask you to first give our audience a short introduction to your military background and services. Sure. I went to the Air Force Academy for college and that was my first experience in the military actually. And when I commissioned from the Air Force Academy, I came out and was in the Air Force and shortly thereafter went to pilot training in Oklahoma. And you go through a year-long pilot training pipeline. And after flying the fighter trainer, the T-38, I was kept on board as an instructor pilot in Oklahoma. And so did a total of maybe four and a half years there in the T-38 and taught there for nearly a thousand hours in the T-38, various young students that went on to fly various platforms in our Air Force. After that, I went to training in Oregon and flew the F-15 there and followed by training there, flew the F-15 in Japan for one year. And after flying the F-15 in Japan, I came into what was called the Air Force Space Command. Air Force Space Command at the time was responsible for the preponderance of the Defense Department's military space capabilities. There was no Space Force when I came into Air Force Space Command. And shortly thereafter, the Space Force was stood up and I came out of a Defense Department strategy school that's out in Alabama and took command of the missile warning unit that we have in Colorado in the Space Force and was there in command until I separated and am now a civilian, which happened a year after I took command. Wow, that was a lot of footprints. You traveled to many places. We traveled a lot. Yeah, I think 10 different assignments in the past nine years. Yeah. So almost 10 years of service in the U.S. military. Oh, 15 years of service. 15 years of service. Wow. So how long did you stay in Space Force before you left the Army? So the Space Force was established in December, it was December 20th, if I'm not mistaken, of 2019 under the Trump administration. And at the time that the service was created, there was only one member of the Space Force, and that was the person who sat on the Joint Chiefs as General Jay Raymond. He was the four-star in charge of all Space Forces. And over the months ahead, there were individuals that began to transfer out of the Air Force space community and into the Space Force. And so it was 2020 that I ended up joining the Space Force. I was one of the first people and was in command of one of the first units to transition into the Space Force. And it's the smallest of our branches of the military. You know, we had a small footprint initially and it's a slow growth process. I don't know the exact number now, but we're talking less than 10,000 active duty service members that are in the force. So I joined in 2020 and I was in the service in the Space Force until I separated from the service on September 1st of 2021, with a total of about 15 and a half years of service total. Wow. Well, thank you for your service first. Thank you. Yeah. So was it in Space Force that you started to notice some of the things that you feel uncomfortable and eventually that you put in the book? It was. It was after I had taken command of this missile warning unit in Colorado. I had just come out of school. As I had mentioned, it was a strategy school and we spent a great deal of time there. For me, it was 2019 and 2020. And I was studying Cold War history, which of course has a lot to do with Marxist ideology and communism and communist revolutions. And so I kind of dug in there, spent a number of hours each day trying to understand that history a little bit better surrounding the Cold War. And that led me to study a whole host of things, including Marx and Engels' 1848 Communist Manifesto. I was surprised at the number of communist revolutions that had taken place throughout the world. In fact, during the 20th century, the ones that people tend to talk most about because they're the biggest countries and they were the most powerful countries is, of course, the Bolshevik Revolution. I think it is completed in 1917, and that's the beginning of the Soviet Union. And then I had studied Mao's Communist Revolution that takes place in China. I think they succeed shortly after World War II, maybe 1949. And then I studied the Cultural Revolution that took place there in the 60s and 70s in China. And having looked at all of those things, I became convinced pretty quickly. You pay attention to something long enough and you start to recognize it fairly quickly. What I was seeing take place in our own country, and unfortunately what was spreading very rapidly into our armed forces and in the Space Force and elsewhere, was what I had recognized to be a kind of activism, political activism, that was rooted in Marxist ideology. And I saw that especially in the aftermath of the George Floyd death. What you saw was activism take to the streets, a lot of violence, and the rhetoric that you saw coming out of these activists was one of the oppressor versus oppressed narrative. It's not new, of course, that that narrative has developed at the very beginning of the Communist Manifesto, and it's been around for a long time. And so that's kind of where I started to really dig in my teeth, as it were, and study the ideology. It also just so happens, I had done a study abroad for the Air Force Academy back in 2005, to the People's Liberation Army Air Force Academy up in Changchun, which is where that academy is at, and had some time that I got to spend there. And that was a really eye-opening experience. And that was my first exposure to Marxism, actually, was at the PLA Air Force Academy. And I hadn't paid much attention to it after that point until I ended up in school as a field grade officer in the Air Force and Space Force, and was studying at our strategy school. Wow. Tell us a bit more about your experience back in 2005 when you were in Changchun. How long did you spend your time there, and what did you experience? Yeah, it was a very short immersion program that the U.S. Air Force was conducting at the time with the Chinese PLA Air Force. Unfortunately, it was just a short spring break trip. And so we were there for a couple of weeks. When we got there, it was a small delegation of us. I think there were four students, and we had a senior officer, an Air Force, U.S. Air Force officer who had taken us on the trip. We started at the embassy. I believe it's in Beijing. And then we went up to Changchun, and we slept in the dormitories with the PLA Air Force cadets. Well, slept with the enemy, sorry. Slept sleeping with the enemy. You know, in fact, but what's interesting, and this goes, this is an important point to make. We use words like that, you know, the enemy. And governments, I suppose, they plant, governments are enemies of one another because they have their own security interests at stake and whatnot. But we were young college students. And even though we were representing our various countries, there's no animus naturally between me as a 20-year-old or a 21-year-old, and this young Marxist PLAF cadet who's a 20-year-old. We were just totally interested in getting to know one another and finding out what each other's world was like. Was it the conversation that you had with your counterpart in the dorm that exposed you to some sort of communism, Marxism? Well, it was. You know, we talked about everything we had the time to talk about. And so one of the things that came up was beliefs and background and family and our roots, essentially. And when that came up, the young men who I was staying with mentioned that they believed in, I hope I'm not mispronouncing it, Marxism. And I thought, what is that? You know, I don't know what that is. And I was a college student. Well, they explained in English what that was, Marxism. And I thought, well, I've heard of it, but I don't know anything about it, which I think is probably true of many Americans until the last year or two. But like I said, I didn't take interest in learning about it. It just was. And I actually asked them, is that how you were raised? And they told me, no, it's not. I was raised in a, in a Tao Jiao or Fo Jiao home. And so it was really interesting that you had these young people who had been raised in one way, but when they're assimilated into the military environment, there was a strict rule in place. It seemed that you're now one thing and you were something before potentially, but now you're one thing because you're an instrument of the state. You're a Marxist. You're a tool in the hands of the state. You'll believe and say what we tell you to say. When you were talking to that young, young man back in China in 2005, did you feel that he really believed in the Marxism? I don't know. My, my gut would tell me not necessarily. I think it was all new to him, but I could be wrong. I'll tell you, we were under constant surveillance, video and audio surveillance everywhere we went. In fact, after coming home from the trip, someone sent me a physical newspaper in the mail that had a picture of me plastered on the front, marching there at the, at their Air Force Academy. And it was a, it was an eyeopening experience. And while everyone that was there was grateful to get home, what surprises me is just how quickly this kind of a cultural shift or societal change can take place in a place that was once very free, like our own country. And there are those today, I just spoke out in New York last week, who are quick to deny that any such thing is taking place in our own country, but those who have seen it before and experienced it before, I've got friends from China. I've got friends who used to live in the Soviet Union and they recognize that they've recognized it for years, but they're, they're very quick to point out that they've seen all of this happening before and they didn't think it would ever come to this country. But at least they can acknowledge that what they're seeing play out politically and culturally in our country is what they'd experienced in their prior life. And unfortunately, there's still too many people that aren't willing to see that clearly for what it is. Yeah. I think it's especially alarming when you see it in the, in the army, in the military. So let's come back to your book. You wrote this book and it got you into trouble. Can you briefly tell our audience what happened? Yeah, briefly. The time that I was in command in Colorado, I saw both young people and senior leaders becoming very politically active. And regardless of your politics, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat, a far right or a far left or somewhere in between, as your viewer would be aware, when politics starts to drive the culture of any workplace, there's the potential for division to very quickly come into that workplace. And as you can imagine, our military forces thrive on unity. We all wear the same uniform. We have dress and grooming standards. And whatever our politics are, you can leave them at the doorstep when you put on the uniform and come into work every day because your job doesn't have anything to do with policy per se. It has to do with a mission that essentially has to do with deterring and deterring conflict. And if that fails, then winning conflict. And so I saw politics from our youngest service members, they were becoming quite active on social media in a way that was detrimental to what I think would be morale or good order and discipline. And I saw senior leaders also becoming quite active, but it was all very left-wing politics. And the talking points of that political narrative wasn't just, I'll put it this way, support for Democrat policies. It was Marxist rhetoric. It was things I had been studying for the last couple of years was about the oppressor and the oppressed. Things that I saw journalists at the New York Times writing about in the 1619 Project, trying to deconstruct or dismantle American history and demonize every aspect of it. That was now showing up for our service members and official trainings that we were receiving from our senior leaders. And so I'll give you just a couple of examples. I was just reviewing a written complaint that I had filed earlier today in which I detail for the Space Force Inspector General's office what should be considered illegal discrimination that was taking place that was all rooted in a Marxist critical race theory narrative of America and of affairs in our country. We were sent videos demonizing the fathers of our country and the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, things that our service members swear an oath to support and defend. We don't swear an oath to a man. We don't swear an oath to a political office. We swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution against its enemies. And we were watching videos that demonized those very things, which of course undermined perhaps the trust that these young people place in their oath. And so I wrote a written complaint about that. And when I received back a dismissal of that complaint that I had filed, then I decided that I was going to publish a book because even using my chain of command, which I had done and we haven't talked about here, even with a written complaint to the Inspector General's office, I didn't seem to be able to hold people accountable for the activism that was tearing apart our military and dividing it through the system. And so I thought if I publish a book, the book you mentioned, Irresistible Revolution, and trace through the history of Marxist ideology and what it's doing to military culture at the in real time, hopefully congressmen, elected officials will wake up. Hopefully some of our senior military leaders will choose to get educated on this and see how disrupted this is. And hopefully it'll be a voice for the many tens or hundreds of thousands of service members that were starting to feel the oppressive hand of Marxist ideology in the workplace. And in fact, I continue to get notes to this day from people thanking me for writing the book, saying that they can't believe how quickly their military services have been changing over the past year and a half. And so that's the kind of the origins. Very briefly, it doesn't seem like it was very briefly, but it was very briefly in a nutshell of the book, why I wrote it. That, of course, got me in trouble and I was fired from my command. That was in May of 2021. And I essentially entered into a three-month holding pattern where I was segregated from the rest of the service members on my base, was given my own office away from my old troops, and awaited an investigation, a so-called investigation to play out, that I never really heard anything about. And I asked for a retirement, which was denied, and I voluntarily separated from the service. And that happened in September of last year. Why do you think that your complaint was dismissed? Was it because they didn't agree with you that these were rooted in Marxism? Or do you think that somehow they were afraid to tackle this issue? More of the latter, perhaps both. I'll tell you, because I had tried to use my chain of command before filing a complaint, and certainly before writing a book, my sense was that they agreed that what we were seeing take place was a problem. This is my immediate supervisor, up the chain of command to the guy in charge of the service. My sense was they too thought this was a problem that needed to stop. Otherwise, it would have a negative impact. And that was the feedback I was getting, although they were uninterested or afraid of holding people accountable for their activism. And I can tell you, there were things that were punishable, even with prison time, according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, there were things that were punishable with being kicked out of the service, because they're simply things that service members should not do, like publicly criticize the sitting commander-in-chief. That's a punishable offense. To take to social media and advocate for the burning down of US cities, as a service member, you should go to jail. And so there are things like that that were taking place that they were afraid to hold people accountable for, because as you're aware, when Marxist narratives of reality start to take root in a society, they fundamentally change the culture, as one way of putting it, underlying basic assumptions or beliefs about reality. And it becomes extremely taboo to speak against the narrative, because then you'll be labeled all sorts of things. And in this case, recently in American history and in the military, it had a lot to do with racial identity politics. And so if you have, for example, a white commander, who's considering holding someone who's black accountable, because all of our dialogue has been white versus black in this Marxist narrative, that's seeking to undermine our order in society, there's instantly a fear that you'd be labeled something like a racist, if you as a white commander were to hold a black airman accountable, but it just shouldn't be so. It shouldn't matter what your race is in the military. It shouldn't matter what your economic stratification was or is before you entered the military service. All that matters is that you wear the uniform, that you're a member of the family or team of the Defense Department now. And all of that fades away, but we've reintroduced those identity politics into the military and it creates a climate of fear. You mentioned earlier that some of these ideology were incorporated in the formal training in the military. Can you give us some example in terms of the training that they gave? Yeah, so let me, I'll give you two examples. I've got many more in my book. We had, after George Floyd's death, we had a black senior enlisted leader who was very well respected in the Air Force taking to social media and actually ended up producing official Air Force videos. He's in uniform and he says things like, I am George Floyd. I am black before I am a service member. I am a black man who happens to also be in the military. That is race identity politics. It's something that instantly generated waves throughout the service. We had him saying things like he's afraid every time he looks in the mirror. In fact, we had the chief of staff of the Air Force, he's the current chief of staff of the Air Force, four star, who's also black male, say that when the police lights go on, he's afraid that he might be the next George Floyd. That's a stupid thing to say. And he shouldn't be allowed to say it in uniform. It's a stupid thing. Even if that's his view, you don't start to hyper-politicize your military workforce by injecting that kind of thinking into the military environment, even if it's your view. But that was the kind of rhetoric on the one. Now, that's not a formal training or an official training. That's just rhetoric that was coming out of our senior leaders. At the same time, at my base, for example, we were hosting reading clubs or reading groups for our service members to participate in, in which white members, it was all about black and white, by the way. It was black and white, black and white. I had a young Asian male come to me in my office when I was the commander and say, Hey, I'm getting out of the service because clearly to our leaders in the defense department, everything is about the black white divide. And he's like, where does that leave me? He's an Asian male. And so when my service time is up, I'm out. I didn't sign up for this. So we, we had these reading clubs and if you're a white airman or space force term is guardian and you had concerns or questions or emotions that you needed to center, that was the way they said it, then you should excuse yourself from the training and go find other, other white people to share your burdens so that you're not imposing your burdens on other, on people of color. That kind of rhetoric I've never heard before in my time in the military. And it simply has no place in our military because we don't think that way in the military, but that's the kind of thing that you started to see cropping up. So again, there are many other examples, but it was having a detrimental impact on these young people. They'd come sit down in my office unsolicited by me and explain to me. And again, it affected them, whether they were Republican or Democrat, whether they were white or black or Asian or something else. All of those things that never mattered before we're starting to come to the fore and people were becoming quite emotional. Not sure if they, how long this was going to last. And when this started to happen, President Trump was the president. He tried to stop this with an executive order because he was getting feedback that this was damaging the morale and good order and discipline of our military and our federal agencies. So he signed an executive order in September of 2020. And the first day that Joe Biden came into office, he undid that previous executive order with a new executive order and reintroduced diversity, inclusion and equity trainings and the Marxist rooted critical race theory into the training routine of our service members. And I'll tell you, it's an oppressive spirit to use that term. And there are a lot of people getting out of the military right now because they think they're disinterested in serving a highly politicized military environment. And our services are also having trouble recruiting new people to join the service at the moment because people are being disincentivized to join a hyper politicized military. So it's a lose-lose to pursue this path. Were there pushbacks from other service members when they introduced this kind of training? There were, there's far more now, but there was pushback. Most of it was quiet and private because people were afraid. And you know how that goes. I mean, so I watched this, there was a lot of grumbling behind the scenes. People were complaining about what was changing and how rapidly it was changing. But then we'd go sit in these trainings and everyone would keep their mouth shut. And they'd simply think I'm here to listen for an hour or I'm here to listen for two hours. I might ask a question that implies disagreement, but I'm certainly not going to come out and disagree with this. And unfortunately, the way this bullying climate works is that if you seem to indicate that you somehow are out of alignment with an ideology, then that either means that you've got a problem or a part of the problem, or you've self-identified as a white supremacist or a white nationalist or a racist or an alt writer or pick your label. I mean, there's a lot of fearful labels that are thrown around. And so you don't dare identify yourself as one of those by disagreeing or simply asking a question. You've seen this. There's people, this is changing gears, but I mean, Joe Rogan, world's most popular podcaster, 13 million subscribers or something like that. The guy's not exactly a staunch conservative, but the moment bullies can do it, they grab a hold of things that they've said over the course of years and they start to try and steamroll you by bullying. They don't care what side you're on. There's this bullying, the spirit of bullying, and we see that all over the place. So the bottom line for me was, as I watched that take place in our military, you can't allow that to take place in a military and expect your military to survive. It'll become just a remnant of what it once was, where people actually appreciated serving in their military. They were excited to serve because they're patriotic. And now overly zealous patriotism is labeled extremism, because after all, that's maybe nationalistic and nationalistic is evil. And I mean, you get into this fearful cycle of accusations and allegations about what people believe, whether or not they actually believe those things. And boy, that's a terrible world to live in. It's a fearful world to live in. And people, they want to distance themselves from that environment because it's so uncomfortable. And that leads to trouble for our military. So most stayed quiet, but why did you speak up? Well, one of the things that you see, if you studied the cultural revolution, for example, is just how quickly things continue to turn, how quickly they turn on the military leaders, they being, I should be more clear. People always ask, who's they? Even the military that was once respected, all of a sudden becomes an enemy of the people, if they're opposed to the political narrative that happened. There's a great book called Gang of One by a professor named Fan Shun. And I think he wrote the book in 2004. Chinese? Perhaps. He lived through the, just like Xi Van Fleet, who you've interviewed before. Fan Shun, he might be in Minnesota. He's a professor at a small technical college. And he wrote a book called Gang of One years ago, detailing his experience as a young child in Mao's cultural revolution. And he picks right up in 1966, 67. And when you read that book, it's like, if you read it during 2019, or 2020, or 2020, it was like, you thought, surely this guy couldn't have written this 15 years ago. This is like, he's talking about our own day, exactly what's happening, the people raising the fists and chanting slogans, the different flags and banners that people would wear, forcing people to kneel down and confess their privilege or to apologize for their supremacy or their oppressor status, and then the violence. And we're frankly, quite lucky that it didn't spread more than it did in the year 2019, 2020. Not yet, it did not. And that's why, so you ask why I write a book. Because if you study where this goes, if it's left unchecked, it leads to violence and civil strife. And so the last chapter of my book, I warn about, look, other countries that allowed this to get above them in history, they end up being wrecked by violence. And so especially if our military becomes subjected to this Marxist culture of fear, a climate of fear, there's no hope for society if your military is wrecked by it. Your military becomes a pawn of the state. It's a one party military, just like I experienced at the PLA Air Force Academy, where everyone says they believe the same thing, and they're afraid to say otherwise. And we're getting there pretty quickly, although I think there's enough people waking up at the moment that they're trying to speak up, they're trying to put their foot down. And it's one here and a dozen there and one here and a few more here and there. Every bit of those people make a difference. One person can make a big difference in their local unit, their squadron, their battalion. And we need those people to stand up from within the service. And I'm out of the service and I'll keep speaking up about these things, but there are people in the service that need to stay put and to help cultivate a healthy, non-politicized work environment for the rest of our service members. But yeah, that's why I wrote the book. It's because where this leads is far uglier than where we've gotten so far. Yeah. You can see where it's going, where it's going. Yeah. So coming from communist country, this oppressor versus oppressed ideology or theory is so familiar. It's very familiar to us. And it's really something that's intentionally set up to divide people with the ultimate goal or so to control the crowd. But do you feel that people who advocate the same kind of narrative today in the US military, are they doing it intentionally, realizing that this is the ultimate goal we're going to achieve? Or are they doing that unintentionally, just doing what they thought was right, but without realizing where this is headed? Yeah. I don't think many people realize or believe where this is headed. Now, I think there are plenty of people filled with ideology who are caught up in what is a leftist political spirit. But this Overton window has shifted further and further left with every passing decade, especially since the 1960s. And so what is leftist today is frankly, flat out Marxist in many ways. And so what I see is, for example, there are plenty of young people who are learning about the world and experiencing it for the first time in their lives now that they've up and left home, and they've joined the military, and they're glued to social media. And they've got certain personalities that they follow on social media. They've got certain shows that they watch. And then they listen to what their senior military leaders are telling them. And if some of them happen to take pride in their academic, I'll say, I hate to beat this drum. I always prided myself in being a political military service member. I'm admittedly conservative. But many of our senior military leaders come out of our Ivy League schools, where they go and get advanced degrees, and they're increasingly left in their political leaning. And then they impose it on our young people. These young people both read about it, all they look at is headlines from CNN, MSNBC, et cetera, and so on and so forth. And then they go to their social media platforms, and they're seeing the same narrative. And then they hear it from their senior military leaders. What else are they to believe or think, unless they were taught differently growing up, and they're really strongly rooted in some other worldview? There's a reason they call it subversion for a reason. Even people who have been taught properly about what American principles or values look like, the fact that you respect other people's worldview, the fact that people can believe and think and even speak the way that they want to, even if it offends you, to appreciate those principles is one thing. But subversion is subversion because it is so sly, so subtle. People don't often recognize when their foundations are being eroded from underneath them, and their worldview is continuing to shift and change until you give it one year or five. And pretty soon people believe a whole host of ideas that are simply off base, that are incompatible with American values. And the leftists would say, well, that's just nationalistic of you. Of course, there's different worldviews and everything's relative. And no one worldview is more valuable than the other. But of course, you have to now view my leftist worldview, or else I'll bully you into submission and into the ground. And in the military of all places, people are actually quite respectful. You don't get that everywhere in society. In fact, people can say some downright mean things. You have to watch your words in the military, because if you're too disrespectful, depending on who you say it to, you'll be held accountable for it. And so there's already a level of accountability that exists in our military to ensure that we don't have illegal discrimination, to ensure that everyone is welcome and included. It came as a really big surprise to our service members who didn't believe we have problems with this in the first place, to now all of a sudden have a heavy hand come down on them with a bunch of formalized trainings telling them, look, we've got this really terrible problem here in the services. We've got white supremacists, we've got oppressors, we've got some of you oppressed, and we need to get to the bottom of this and help solve the problem. And everyone kind of looks at each other and thinks, well, we didn't know we had this problem, but we're willing to start listening. And because it was so new and so rapid, maybe that's another reason why people were so reluctant to speak up about it initially. It wasn't just that they were fearful, and I think that was a part of it. It's because they're not sure exactly where this is going or how long they're going to have to tolerate it. And what I recognized is this is the beginning of something that will wildly, rapidly sweep across our entire country and culture until it fundamentally changes everything. In fact, that's the phrase that Barack Obama used coming into office. He said he wanted to fundamentally transform the country. Well, you don't want to fundamentally transform anything that's good or decent or whole and lovely and praiseworthy. You want to fundamentally transform something that you want to wreck or bring down. And that's exactly what Marxism has always attempted to do. If you look at the history, I've got a book on my shelf behind me, letters of Marx and Engels to their American comrades and their other comrades throughout Europe in the late 19th century. They've been planning, those who really do know what they're up to, they've been planning to undermine the West and American society ever since the Communist Manifesto was penned. And they spent decades trying to figure out ways to wreck the presidency in the United States, to undermine the Senate. They sought to undermine the values of the churches and to get into the school system and change the values of the West. Because if people hold to their values, their beliefs, then it's nearly impossible for an ideology like Marxism to uproot the society and fundamentally change it. But if you get people dislodged from those values, and in the West, in America, we say Judeo-Christian values, if you get people dislodged from those values to the degree that they're searching for something to replace it, then ideology becomes exceptionally persuasive. It's powerful. And they're willing to grab a something like the oppressor versus the oppressed narrative and make that the lens through which they view the world. So for a lot of Chinese Americans, they feel that this country is going down the exact path as China, as Venezuela, as those socialist countries like Cuba. But I think for a lot of young people, for a lot of Americans, they may not realize that. So what do you think we should do to help to reverse this trend? I think there's a lot of things that need to be done. But every person who's listening can try to learn the truth, learn to articulate the truth, and to speak the truth boldly and courageously in whatever sphere of influence they have. If that means it's just your family or your friends, and you've got five people that you can help influence, then try and be a light and an influence for those people. And if you've got 5,000, then all the better. But people are becoming active in their communities. And I think this starts at the local level. People are becoming active in their local, even K-12 school systems and school boards. People are standing up and actually paying attention. In the schools, people are standing up within their churches, wherever they happen to worship, whatever their faith. And so even as things are becoming more divided and polarized, so too people are waking up and some are taking the courage to speak up. And everywhere I go and speak, I'm asked the same question, what is it that can be done? And there's a lot of answers to that question. But for me, you don't want to live in a society in which free speech has failed, because that's a terrible end indeed. And so I'm advocating that people use their speech instead of just complain about it behind closed doors. Use your speech, be as respectful as you can, so that we can preserve that liberty as long as possible. And that's the crux of all of liberty in a free society. You have to be able to speak up and share a dissenting view and learn to live comfortably in your own skin with that. And that's courage. And if you're not willing to do that, perhaps we've got some learning yet to accomplish. And unfortunately, many people decide to get brave when it's just a little bit too late. And you need to be brave early and often. Yeah. And I've seen a lot of Chinese Americans actually stepping up. I have too. Yeah. They have come to this country appreciating the freedom and opportunities, and they don't want to lose the freedom. So I think they really feel for what you just said. And I also heard you had a Chinese name. Tell us, what is it? Luo, Si Wei Luo, Jian Zhi, Jian Li De Jian, Zhi Hui De Zhi. And I haven't used it for many years, probably, I don't know, 15 years since someone has called me the name. Who gave you that name? Don't ask me to speak. I was a Chinese teacher back in, it was nearly 20 years ago. Don't ask me to speak in Chinese on the air, though, because I'll embarrass myself and you. No, actually, your pronunciations are very good. Oh, good. Maybe they used to be better. I will share one thing. Maybe, you know, there are a lot of idioms in Chinese. And as a Western speaker of Mandarin, most of those idioms, they escape you. And if you hear one, you don't understand what you just heard. And so unless you learn the idiom, the words don't tend to make sense to us. And I learned a number of idioms when I was actually in China, spent some time in Taiwan as well. But I finished writing my book, the reason I bring this up, and I came upon a Chinese idiom. I don't even know if it's a popular one. And I don't even know if your Chinese speaking listeners will have heard it before. And so I'll do my best to pronounce it here. But I thought this belongs in the front of my book. And so I included it. I wrote it into my own personal copy. I've got certain things written in here. But this idiom says, Yeah, that's right. Wow. I'm going to say that again. Coming events cast their shadows before them. And I know there's so many idioms. You know, there's thousands of them that people have never heard before. But I had seen that one. I suppose it's probably an authentic Chinese idiom. Coming events cast their shadows before them. And that's why, because our Chinese Americans and others perhaps overseas who have lived through a communist society or culture before have experienced it, they're able to see with a greater clarity what's coming. If you studied it in great depth, and I know there's plenty of people that have studied it more than I have, but I've studied it in some depth, then I'm able to recognize all of the signs all around us, that this is coming, that the events are casting their shadows before them. And I think you'd be foolish to not be willing to entertain the idea that we're in big trouble when it comes to this idea of Marxist revolution or communist revolution. In fact, in my book, I call it a cold civil war. And that's unfortunately, essentially, what we're looking at in our own society. Even now, there's so much polarization, it's like the Cold War, there were two great powers who were in conflict with one another, but they weren't always fighting each other. Right now, there's essentially enough political division, hatred, animosity, visceral emotion involved that it has high potential for violence. Fortunately, good people everywhere are trying to keep all of that at bay and perhaps even some help from the heavens, keeping this at bay and giving us some time to try and get some of this right and work out our differences. Well, Matt, it was a great pleasure talking to you and thank you so much for taking the time to share with us these experiences. Yeah, thank you for your time and thanks for all the good work you do. Thank you. Well, thank you for watching Focus Talk. I'll see you next time.