A History of Ideology and Intent
Grainger holds a B.S. in Psychology and is currently earning his Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Liberty University. He’s an active men’s ministry leader and pastoral counselor with over 5 years of experience, currently seeing clients in both faith-based and clinical settings.
Karina holds a Master’s degree in Behavioral Science with concentrations in mental health, counseling, marriage and family therapy, career development, and child and adolescent therapy. She has a robust research background and is board-certified in brain health, ADHD, sensory processing, and wellness. She, too, actively sees clients in clinical practice.
Together, we represent both the psychological and pastoral lenses on today’s mental health landscape. We are deeply committed to truth over trend, accountability over blame, and growth over grievance. In this article, we explore how communism has historically undermined the structure and values of the American family. Combining historical evidence with lived experience, Karina’s firsthand memories of life under communism and Jason’s work as a counselor, we expose how communist ideology weakens faith, parental authority, and generational bonds. Our shared commitment to protecting the American family drives this important conversation.
What you are about to read is Grainger’s reflection on the historical agenda to dismantle the family, paired with Karina’s lived testimony of the very communism some in Gen Z now idealize; an ideology that seeks to unravel the foundational merits of the family.
Grainger
I’ll get right to it. No fluff. The attack on the family isn’t new. And it isn’t accidental. It was intentional, particularly by proponents of communism.
Even before the Communist Manifesto, Robert Owen, founder of the “Yankee Utopians”, wrote that the absurdity of religion and marriage, founded on individual property, were total monstrosities.1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels often wrote about the destruction, dissolution, and abolition of the family. Marx once wrote,
“The hallowed correlation of parent and child is disgusting.”
The Russian Orthodox Church had long prohibited divorce. But with the Bolshevik rise to power, that prohibition was eliminated, causing an explosion in divorce rates. The dismantling of the family opened the door for Lenin to implement his system of terror. Very early on, it was understood that marriage was the greatest impediment to implementing communism in any society.
Bolshevik theorist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote:
“But the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them. That is, from those mothers and fathers who happily accept that the best educators are not the parents, but the collective, not the sanctuary of the home, but the supremacy of the state. The children would be reared by society. Children would be wards of the state.”
Margaret Sanger
Then there’s Margaret Sanger, who is not winning “Mother of the Year” anytime soon, according to her son, Grant. She is best known for her quiet campaign to eradicate the Black population. Critics twist her infamous line, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” in an attempt to preserve the reputation of someone they call a hero. Unfortunately, in 1926, this hero went on to give a speech to the Klu Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, likely repeating such rhetoric.
But who was she? Well, besides being an openly neglectful mother, she joyfully told her husband she would be sexually free whether he liked it or not. Such “freedom” was a movement championed by Emma Goldman, who was eventually deported by President Wilson. Margaret’s first of many affairs was with Goldman.
After destroying her marriage, she went on to destroy other marriages, having numerous affairs with men across Europe, including H. G. Wells, who was infatuated with the “Candid, fair, and honest Joseph Stalin.” Wells was also an admirer of Lenin.
When the racial eugenicist herself wrote a June 1935 article titled, “Birth Control in Russia”, this was the first clear indication of the ideological blueprint she wanted to embed in American consciousness. She originally began American Birth Control League, later renamed Planned Parenthood, to rid the earth of “Idiots, morons, imbeciles, and the mentally and physically defective.” What a Mother Teresa she was. Ironically, Sanger was startled by how many abortions were taking place in Russia. She was for eugenics and birth control, but not abortion so much. She eventually made the statement,
“A functioning Communistic society will ensure the happiness of every child and will assume the full responsibility for its welfare and education.”
There, she leaks her true intention of the child being property of the state.
But abortion had already spun out of control, to the point that Stalin himself, one of the deadliest men in world history, had to ban abortion after observing the catastrophic population decline. And Sanger’s mission to export this ideology to America was unwavering. The family, once a cornerstone of civilization, had become a liability to communism. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had declared the family a “formidable stronghold of all the turpitudes of the old regime.”
Educational Infection
Ralph de Toledano, a historian who studied Columbia University’s interest in communism with comprehensive tenacity, wrote,
“The primary method [to wage warfare on Western civilization] would be to saturate Western culture with the miasma of unrestrained sex. The destruction of the West, from which a Marxist utopia would arise, was to be achieved through a mass brainwashing of neo-Marxism, wrapped up in what euphemistically became known as Critical Theory.”
Toledano identified the two greatest obstacles to a Marxist utopia are God and family.
The architects of Communism’s infiltration of the West declared the primary focus was the education system, getting naïve American parents to hand over their children to the universities for ideological reprogramming.
Kate Millett
Introducing Kate Millet, a student at Columbia University, where she earned her PhD and wrote her most famous book Sexual Politics. She grew up deeply troubled. She frequently had psychotic episodes that included several attempts to kill her sister, Mallory.
I’ll leave you with this enlightening bit of information. To show you where this issue really is, here is an excerpt from a gathering among university professors, led by Kate Millet, where she led a chilling chant. Millet’s sister, Mallory, detailed the following chant at an event she attended:
Kate Millet (KM): “Why are we here today?” the chairwoman asked.
Group (G): “To make revolution,” they answered.
(KM): “What kind of revolution?”
(G): “The Cultural Revolution,” they chanted.
(KM): “And how do we make Cultural Revolution?”
(G): “By destroying the American family!”
(KM): “How do we destroy the family?”
(G): “By destroying the American patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
(KM): “And how do we destroy the American patriarch?” she probed.
(G): “By taking away his power!”
(KM): “How do we do that?”
(G): “By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
(KM): “How can we destroy monogamy?”
(G): “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality!”
Columbia University’s Red Legacy
By the 1960s, Marxist ideology had a firm grip on universities, namely Columbia University, which is now no surprise. What did Columbia U produce?
- Early faculty at Columbia was John Dewey, whose work was admired, praised, and eventually implemented by the Bolsheviks soviet education system.
- 2005: MEALAC controversy- professor and students accused of hostility to pro-Israel students, also anti-Israel bias and Jewish student intimidation uncovered
- 2007: Iranian president, while holding Holocaust denial and Israel’s right to exist, was asked to speak at Columbia.
- 2010: BDS. Ultimately there was no divestment but Jewish students reported feeling very unsafe, with no recorded response.
- 2016: pro-Palestinian events begin to increase. Posters everywhere comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. Student-wide call for intifada. Jewish students filed complaints regularly to no response from university,.
- 2023: after 10/7, intense protests began. Pro-Hamas vitriol filled the campus. Students set up Gaza solidarity encampment, pro Hamas students occupied buildings and refused to allow Jewish students in, increased violence, including property damage, physical altercations with police, assault on Jewish students, and even discovery of a swastika on campus.
The Effects of Marxism on the Family
Karina’s Experience Under Communism:
In the early 1950s, after the Bolsheviks had financially stripped the wealthy upper class (in the name of fairness and equality), they repurposed private homes and buildings to force people into communal living. The highest achievable honor became getting an apartment of your own. People applied and waited for years to receive one. Many, like my paternal grandparents, even married each other to secure an apartment that was pending approval for my grandmother, they did end up falling in love later.
I was born in the former Soviet Union in the early 1980s to a small Jewish family. My parents shared a 600-square-foot apartment with my father’s parents. We shared one bathroom and one kitchen, and the living space was communal. (This living arrangement was actually considered wealthy and upper class.) Most families had to share living spaces with strangers.
The Red Attack on Men
As Marxist ideology spread in the 1960s, patriarchy was cast as inherently evil, men as the root of all social ills, and the solution as simple, remove the man. This was fertile ground for implanting policies to ensure the demoralization of men.
Karina
For a man, life in the Soviet Union was bleak at best. Once school was over, the options for higher education, work, and the future were predesigned and prewritten for everyone. You only had 2–3 rational choices, and all of them required government micromanagement. No matter what you did, where you went, or how you lived, you were watched, managed, and “parented” by the government.
By nature, men are providers and protectors. Men have roles that ground a family system and support the healthy development of its members. But take away a man’s right to provide and protect, and all that’s left is misery. The only other option—what my father chose—was to fight the system and run. However, that risk carried deadly consequences, literally. Going against the government meant:
- Joining the black market, which in our language was capitalism. The black market operated on a supply-and-demand system. Most of it was run by men, but my mother was involved too, as were several women at the time. Supplies were brought in from Poland and other nearby countries and sold privately.
- Practicing religion—any religion. There was only one god, and it was the government.
- Reading, listening to, or watching American music, movies, and books.
- Denouncing the government in public.
- Protecting children against the government run and managed school system.
What made life in the Soviet Union even more unbearable was the cognitive and emotional abuse, manipulation, and control of children. Once a child turned six and was sent to school for an education, the indoctrination began. Children were taught from first grade to build loyalty and unquestioning love toward the government—only the government. My mother was desperate to keep me home as long as she could, hoping we’d get our refugee papers before I started first grade. However, that didn’t happen, and she had to send me to school. Parents who quietly hated the Soviet Union dreaded the day school started for their children. No one was excited, no one was cheerful—it felt like going to a funeral. Children were taught to tattle on their parents if they heard any anti-communist conversations, spies in our own home. The entire school system was carefully developed to ensure complete compliance and order.
Do I look happy on my first day of 1st grade?
Karina’s Personal Experience:
My father couldn’t protect me. He understood that I was now the property of the communist party. Everyone knew, but the risk of change was so high most people just couldn’t handle the stress of planning asylum or a refuge.
Helplessness eats away at our will to live from the inside. In a communist, government-run society, men are ideologically minimized and almost completely controlled to ensure the survival of the country. They close their eyes, bow their heads, and walk into their own demise—dragging their families with them.
My grandfather, a loyal communist, pledged his entire life to the system. He barely worked, barely provided, and reported anyone he knew who was involved in the black market. That is, until his own son and daughter-in-law, my parents, got involved. My father paid him off to keep his mouth shut, and that was the very first time my grandfather felt the power of a tiny bit of freedom. Years later, he finally denounced communism—but not before ruining lives in the name of the idea that everyone should be equal, included, and judged.
Grainger:
There it is. The communistic utopia, manifest before our eyes.
Moynihan Report
It should come as no surprise that President Johnson implemented social programs that inadvertently incentivized single motherhood. But Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about the risks of government programs unintentionally undermining the family. In his report, he wrote that the emerging matriarchal structure developing in many low-income Black households could lead to further marginalization of men and generational dysfunction.
“A community that is centered on the female, with men increasingly in roleless positions, is likely to find it difficult to sustain stable family and community life.”
— Moynihan Report, 1965
No one listened. The unintended consequence was that financial support became easier to access without a male partner present. The father became disposable. As of the 1965 release of the Moynihan report, 3% of white babies were born to single mothers and 23% of black babies were born to single mothers.2 This number, following this policy, jumped quickly to 8% for white babies and eventually, in 2023, was listed as 28% of white babies born to single mothers and 70% of black babies born to single mothers. This shows race was not a factor. It affected everyone.
Why the Father Matters
- In one study, one significant finding was that youth living in fatherless homes have the highest levels of incarceration rates. However, youths in homes where only the father is present, there was no difference in the rate of incarceration than that of youth living in two parent homes.3
- According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, fatherless males are at a significantly greater risk of suicide, mental illness, and becoming a father as a teenager.4
- Daughters of single parents without the father involved are:
- 53% more likely to marry as teenagers
- 71% more likely to have children as teenagers
- and 92% more likely to get divorced.5
Grainger’s Conclusion:
The facts are sobering: The campaign to eliminate fathers in America, and thereby weaken the family, was not only strategic, but devastatingly effective. We are living in the aftermath of a carefully orchestrated ideological takeover.
We must decide whether we have the courage and the clarity to rebuild what was torn down, starting by rebuilding and prioritizing the family.
Karina’s Conclusion:
The minute socialism or communism enters a conversation, life as we know it begins to unravel. The core idea behind both—essentially two sides of the same coin—is to dismantle the most successful and natural system known to humanity: the family. Like animals and plants, people need a healthy structure to grow and evolve.
Communism wants to be your parent—that’s what it ultimately comes down to. It wants to raise you, control you, and keep you “safe.” It is the ultimate hungry and selfish parent: one that gives you life only to dominate you under the guise of protection.
That’s our 4 cents. Stay Classy GP!
Grainger & Karina
1 (All quotes and citations were from the following book, unless otherwise cited)
Kengor, P. (2015). Takedown (1st ed.). WND Books.
2 Moynihan, P. D. (1965). The case for national action: The negro family. U.S. Department of Labor
3 Harper, C. C., & McLanahan, S. S. (2004). Father absence and youth incarceration. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 14(3), 369-397. https://10.1111/j.1532-7795.2004.00079.x
4 Seidel, F. L. P. (2021). The proclivity of juvenile crime in fatherless homes: An urban perspective (Psy.D.).
5 Ibid