On Jan. 26, 2021, a veteran posted a message on the Facebook page of a celebrity with 750,000 followers and a long resume at IMDB. The message read: “Hey man, 15 year army vet with nothing very down on my luck hungry please pray for me so ready to give up.”

The celebrity quickly responded in two posts: “Never give up .. one of your moments, one of your comments can give life to someone you don’t even know 🙏🙏🙏” and “turn to the great healer … the creator of all…”

That celebrity was comedian Jim Breuer, famous for his stint on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1990s, his stoner movie “Half-Baked,” and several hilarious comedy specials.

Breuer is taking an unusual, and perhaps increasingly dangerous, tack for a comedian trying to make a living in our hyper-woke age: he’s mocking the irrationalities and absurdities of our progressivist culture. As his Facebook post shows, he’s being more open about his faith. I recently talked with him about his latest work.

Breuer is concerned about how the coronavirus is being exploited to control Americans for political power and financial gain. He is suspicious of the shutdown and the mask mandates. “Not a good intention,” he claims. “The less we think as a society, the more dangerous we become,” he notes.

He argues that most political discourse today is akin to “studying for a test and then just spitting back the questions and the answers.” Indeed, he has posted some messages on social media as a “test” to just see how many of his followers will be triggered.

The concern with brain-washing is visible in his comedy set. In one of his funniest new routines, Breuer derides his daughter’s college miseducation and its hyper-focus on victimhood:

She came home…. I said: ‘Hey, how you doin’?’ She said: ‘Can’t say that! Racist! Sexist! Racist! LGBTQ! Gender! Gender! Gender! 16 genders! 20 genders! Homophobic! Homophobic! You can’t say that! You can’t say that! Racist! Sexist! You’re a sexist, dad! You’re a racist, mom! Mom’s a racist! Homophobic, homophobic! LGBTQ! Rights! Rights! My rights! Female rights! Women’s rights! People’s rights! We have rights!….’

Incredulous at his daughter’s Pavolovian leftism, Breuer declares: “And I’m paying for that! What a racket! I said, ‘I want my money back, you came back uneducated!’”

Breuer’s brand of comedy — once deemed harmless and well-meaning— has become a target of leftist activists ever-eager for fresh blood. After a recent radio interview in which he made some playful stereotypical remarks about Irish Bostonians, Italian New Yorkers, and Latinos, Twitter erupted with attacks labeling him a racist, incited by an edited clip.

Anyone who has watched Breuer knows such an allegation is ridiculous. “I was insulted, I was hurt, because clearly this human being doesn’t know me…. That’s the problem with Twitter.”

To counteract this negativity, the comedian makes good-faith efforts to use social media for good, including by reaching out to his followers. “The minute I discovered just how much influence you can have in a positive way just by a simple thing I say or a simple joke I put out there… the minute I discovered how inspiring and healing for people… I was drawn a lot more than that than anything else that comes with it…. It keeps me in check.”

Breuer’s positive message might be best described as “love thy neighbor.” He jokingly declares: “You know what they used to call therapists back in the day? Friends!…. We in society have learned that we have to pay for everything. We don’t have to pay for everything. Laughter, intention, understanding, a smile, forgiveness, finding common ground is what is going to make society better.”

He also urges his fans to step away from the vicious, self-destructive 24/7 news cycle: “If you turn everything off… stop all of it… and give yourself a month, and you’ll see how addicted you are… and when you come back you’ll see clearly everything is agenda-driven.”

His comedy is apolitical, in part because he believes so much of contemporary political debate is nothing better than “professional wrestling,” and he thinks few people know what they are talking about. Although he acknowledges that he’s heard from friends that SNL has become too politicized, he couldn’t comment, because he doesn’t watch television.

This is in large part because he grows impatient with the implicit agendas he thinks pervade the programming. “When’s the last time you saw a solid, real husband on television? And I’ll ask you, why do you think that is? It’s very obvious — if you can’t pick up an agenda, you’ve been blinded.”

Some of Breuer’s most insightful comedy discusses how technological developments like Twitter are damaging American society. He describes how addictive and atomizing cell phones have become for an entire generation of young Americans, including his own children. “I hate that thing,” he says of his kids’ cell phones. “They look at it like drugs,” he declares, as he mimics his kids acting like addicts when they go a few hours without their mobile devices.

Breuer is a welcome relief from the acrimonious insanity that defines daily national discourse and unmoors us from what is most important. “If every day you wake up and you’re watching five to six hours of it, it starts to darken your soul. If you spent even 10 percent of that time on your wife, husband, child or someone else you love, your personal life would get better and you could help so many people,” he writes.

With exhortations on self-improvement and loving one’s neighbor, Breuer might be described as the comedic fellow-traveler of the more serious and articulate Jordan Peterson. “Do something you can control that’s good, because you can’t fight hate with more hate. Let’s concentrate on the most important things in life,” he says.

Although he obviously doesn’t take himself too seriously, Breuer is serious about trying to deter the further fraying chords of our national fabric. “We are all stuck here together,” he says on his Facebook page, meaning that Americans need to learn to stop participating in a deadly cancel culture that makes the public square a deadly minefield pitting citizens against one another. He even has a podcast in which he seeks to tell uplifting stories about everyday Americans.

Regarding his increased willingness to talk about God and faith, he explains: “I’ve always had it [faith]. I’ve always been fearful of putting too much out there… which is a little ridiculous…. I don’t know what I am…I can tell you that I pray, I pray a lot and meditate. I want people to know there is a more powerful source to dip into.”

Asked about further plans, he declares he intends to “Hit hard in the God and faith world. I’m more excited about it than anything else. During COVID, I’ve become fearless.” Such topics, he says will be at the forefront of his touring by fall 2021. He is also taping more podcasts, as well as starting “Breakfast with Breu” — a half-hour breakfast call over Zoom with fans.

“I’m in it for the human game, not how big is my next house game,” says Breuer. That human game, most importantly, is his family. He’s often on the road providing for them — he admitted to a New Hampshire newspaper that he hasn’t made much money since February 2020.

“I’m not worried,” declares Breuer. “I’ve also never felt so at peace.” If Breuer can bring some of that peace into the lives of other Americans suffering perhaps the most terrible period of their lives, while also exposing the follies of hyper-sensitive, digitally addicted leftism, God be with him.

Indeed, when considering historical figures responsible for great, influential movements, it’s worth considering if those persons’ personal lives substantiate or undermine their ideology. As Aristotle noted: “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.” In Marx’s case, as Grove City College professor Paul Kengor recounts in his recent book “The Devil and Karl Marx,” the record is not in his favor.

Marx was born into an intellectual and liberal bourgeois family in Trier, Germany. Although his family ancestry was Jewish on both sides, his father Heinrich converted to Lutheranism, it appears less for theological reasons than social ones. Heinrich was an avid reader of anti-Christian writers like Voltaire and Rousseau.

As a student, Marx was not exemplary. He also squandered his parents’ money, while remaining silent for months at a time, even when both his mother and father were ill. When Karl did write, it was typically to request more funds.

In one December 1837 letter to Karl, Heinrich reprimands his selfishness, writing, “You have caused your parents much vexation and little or no joy….”  A few months later, Heinrich died at age 56. Karl did not attend the funeral. He had “other things to do,” one biographer explains.

Karl then turned to his mother for hand-outs. Even after getting married in 1843, he remained dependent on his mother to finance his intellectual career, draining his parents’ savings. Even so, he went nearly 20 years without visiting his mother, and when he finally did see her, it was for money.

His mother declared she wished “Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.” Marx wrote to his wife in complaint: “She does not want to hear a word about money but she destroyed the I.O.U.’s that I made out to her.”

When his mother died, Karl was able to secure about $6,000 in gold and franks as inheritance. That, notes Kengor, is a bit rich, given that point three of the “Communist Manifesto” calls for abolishing the right of inheritance.

The Marx family’s sentiments regarding their son’s profligate tendencies was shared by his wife, Jenny von Westphalen. She told him: “Karl, if you had only spent more time making capital instead of writing about it, we would have been better off.”

Indeed, only a year after “Communist Manifesto” was published, Marx’s landlord evicted him and his family. The landlord, Kengor tells us, was also frustrated with Karl’s grooming. “Washing, grooming, and changing his linens are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk,” notes one Prussian police report on him.

Even sadder, Marx earned so little money that in the winter of 1849-1850 they were forced to take refuge in a dilapidated boarding house. There, their infant child Heinrich Guido died. An eight-year-old son Edgar died in 1855.

Max at one point admitted to Engles: “Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments, and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable.” It did not seem to dawn upon Marx that he was most to blame for their poverty and misfortune.

At one point a servant girl, Helene Demuth, who had been a housemaid for his wife’s family was sent to help the Marx family while they were living in Brussels in 1845. Marx never paid Demuth a penny. He did, however, initiate a long-running extramarital affair with her.

In June 1851, Demuth gave birth to a baby boy, Freddy. Marx refused to acknowledge that the child was his. Instead, Engels took responsibility for the boy. On his deathbed, Engels admitted that Freddy was indeed sired by Marx.

Marx’s family life was a disaster. Four of his six children died before he did. The other two, both daughters, eventually committed suicide. His poor wife, who suffered through adultery and neglect, by the 1860s was expressing a desire to die. Marx once wrote to Engels: “Blessed is he who has no family.” Jenny died in 1881. Marx did not attend the funeral.

These are not flattering details for a man responsible for one of the most popular and influential political and economic philosophies of the twentieth century. Nor, one might add, is the fact that Marx, despite being of Jewish descent, was virulently antisemitic. One biographer notes that his correspondence is “filled with contemptuous remarks about Jews.”

Marx said the “worldly cult of the Jew” was haggling, and that the Jew’s “worldly god” was money. Marx also spoke in a racist, condescending manner of blacks, referring to one as a “gorilla.” Certainly few men are truly saints. Yet Marx, in Kengor’s estimate, was much closer to being a demon.

Why does this matter? For people to subscribe to certain political ideologies, especially those as sweeping in scope as Marxism, they should be aware of the motivations and lives of those they aim to follow. In the case of Marx, those motivations were arrestingly selfish. His life is a case study in how to mistreat everyone close to you.

This is supposed to be the person who proposed how to free the oppressive masses from their social and economic bondage? As Kengor notes, Marx knew practically no members of the proletariat, and those he did know, he viewed with disdain, or, in the case of his servant mistress, as people to be exploited.

When one contrasts the life of Marx to another man whose ideology has claimed billions of followers, the differences are dramatic. Jesus of Nazareth was a man devoted to his parents — indeed, as he was dying on the cross, he made sure his mother would be cared for! (John 19:25-27). Like Marx, he was impoverished, although He still gave so much of Himself that thousands of people followed wherever He went.

Jesus exhibited love and compassion for the poorest, most disenfranchised people of his generation. In a word, he was everything Marx was not.

If we are to consider whose life better matches his teaching, the answer is obvious. If the leaders of the world had listened more closely to Jesus, and less to Marx, as Kengor soberly reminds us, there may have been as many as 100 million fewer murders in the twentieth century. Given many today offer panegyrics to Marx and his teachings, we should pray we don’t have to learn that lesson afresh.