I appreciated the scholarly & dispassionate way the American left is exposed as the nefarious influence it has always been. Very worthwhile to listen to, especially as it exposes Obama’s close connections with the radical left.

After listening to it online, I wanted to download it for future reference but there was no way offered to do this (even thought the link indicated I could).

Flynn presents a mainly fractured narrative here, leaping from topic to topic, making broad assumptions each time. There’s very little that’s actually “scholarly” about it. How Plymouth settlers managed to be “Communists” long before Marx is baffling, though I suppose Flynn just means they lived as a commune. His self-satisfied laughter at the outcomes of this experiment is followed by a telling remark—that socialism works for those who don’t, and free markets work for those who do—a platitude that sounds quaint next to today’s stock market numbers. I would point out to him that if this method of living didn’t work at Plymouth it certainly did for the forest people living throughout Latin America; as a social arrangement, such a situation went very well for centuries. It definitely isn’t outside the human experience, which his argument, and condescension, seems to imply. Whether it could ever have worked at Plymouth is hard to say, and impossible to know. American history is however rich in utopian communities—many of them religious—that were successful, and some even continue to exist today. This is just one example where his approach (which essentially amounts to a tautology, or a circular argument asserting that “the Left is a failure because the Left has failed”), being more than happy to confirm its own assumptions, is blind to the complexities of the very phenomena he wants to discuss.

He also seems unaware of any writers and thinkers whose work is important in these contexts, and provides no substantive discussion of the social, political or cultural situations that lead to the alternative formulations of the Left. It’s as if they sprung up entirely on their own, overnight, just to “scare the squares.”

Looking through reviews of Flynn’s other work at Amazon, he seems to make a living out of building little straw men.