U.S. cities are burning up and hollowing out. Statues of America’s Founding Fathers are being defaced or torn down. The formerly fair and balanced American press has become unapologetically aligned with the left. Freedom of speech on college campuses is dead. Illegal immigrants enjoy citizenship rights. Professional athletes are savaging the American flag and Way of Life that made them multimillionaires. Police departments are being defunded as U.S. citizens frantically arm themselves.
Yet none of this should surprise anyone who has been paying attention.
For many years Americans have been warned that a plot to subvert America really was unfolding, and that we needed conviction and courage to confront it before it reached critical mass. Sadly, however, Americans never seem to react in a timely manner to an existential threat like Hitler, Hirohito or Osama Bin Ladin.
Early Warnings
Decades ago, on April 3, 1969, writer G. Edward Griffin, author of The Fearful Master and nearly 50 other books, lectured about this effort to subvert America. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLV7KU0Bo2k.) As early as 1928 international communism identified exploiting race relations in the U.S. as the key to this plot. Griffin explained that the purpose of the widespread riots of 1968 and 1969 was to compel the U.S. to move gradually and legally toward socialism and that the building of socialism in America was the communist revolution. Griffin was especially concerned with black studies programs—which teach a revisionist, Marxist view of U.S. history that paradigmatically frames whites as oppressors and blacks as perpetual victims and encourages a separate black national identity—that then were gaining traction at American universities.
In the early 1980s, former KGB operative and defector Yuri Bezmenov (aka Tomas Schuman) instructed that the Soviets were waging total psychological warfare against the U.S., employing the strategy of the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu that subversion—destroying your enemy from within—was superior to military conquest. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avbIhMi9OWg.) Bezmenov explained that the ultimate purpose of subversion was to negate the common sense and critical faculties of American citizens so thoroughly that they could not protect themselves. Subversion seeks to divide constituent social groups—blacks vs. whites, women vs. men, gays vs. heterosexuals—in order to spawn distrust, dissension and dysfunction (i.e., identity politics). U.S. members of academia, the media and Hollywood elites are responsible for most subversion.
Subversion comprises four sequential phases:
- “Demoralization” in which the population—for a period of 15-30 years—is brainwashed with Marxist propaganda that is not counterbalanced with patriotic American ideology. Marxist teaching infiltrates the enclaves of American society where public opinion and culture are formed, including education, religion, social life, the administrative state and government, the military, law and order, and labor-employer relations. Subversion insists upon a spurious standard of equality: that all constituent U.S. social groups—comprising race, gender, religion and sexual orientation—should experience equal outcomes, and that any disparities necessarily result from systemic white oppression. For example, if Hispanic women in America do not earn the same average per capita income as a group as do white men, “systemic white racism” and “white privilege” account for this discrepancy. Principal goals of subversion include undermining religion and belief in God; injecting Marxism into education while curtailing the study of socially useful subjects such as math, science and foreign languages; and displacing elected, politically accountable authorities with non-elected social actors such as the media. Subversion attacks law and order by stigmatizing the arresting officer while vindicating the criminal. Labor unions are subverted when they strike to promote ideological causes rather than legitimate worker demands. Bezmenov said in 1984 that Americans had already been thoroughly demoralized.
- “Destabilization” inserts the government incrementally into the lives of Americans, promising more benefits and entitlements, thereby inducing Americans to rely ever more extensively upon government assistance in all aspects of their lives. At the time, Bezmenov viewed the destabilization process as well underway.
- “Crisis” contemplates a change in power, preceded by cataclysmic events that divide the country. Extensive chaotic rioting and looting resulting in martial law or a constitutional impasse may precede such a crisis. Crisis usually leads to civil war or invasion by foreign armies.
- “Normalization” occurs when the socialist/communist regime consolidates its authority and the citizenry accepts the new order. A classic example of “normalization” was when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968.
Subversion Tactics
Leftist activist and communist ally Saul D. Alinksy wrote two influential books prescribing specific tactics to destabilize and destroy America : Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971). Author and cultural commentator Larry Alex Taunton’s recent article “Understanding What Is Happening in America: A Christian Response” (see https://larryalextaunton.com/2020/07/understanding-what-is-happening-in-america-a-christian-response/) summarizes Alinsky’s key principles, denouncing his strategy as “evil.” Well-known Alinsky-style community organizers include Barack Obama and Jane Sanders, the wife of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Hillary Clinton wrote her college senior thesis on Alinksy.
Most importantly, Alinksy emphasized in Reveille that radicals do not seek to improve or reform an existing and functioning society. Rather, radicals strive to realize an abstract, visionary utopia—to “build the world of men’s dreams” (italics added). Radicals are devoted to “an eternal war” without either compromise or rules of fair play. And politics represent unconditional war.
Radicals devote their energies exclusively to seizing power. Radicals cultivate conflicts among the races, sexes and social strata to destabilize, but the issues they employ for so doing are not the issues with which they are genuinely concerned. Rather, and as one Alinsky proponent explained, “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” (Italics added.) Key Alinsky tactics include:
- Divide and conquer. Foster conflict, suspicion and ill will among groups of people: black against white, women against men, poor against rich, immigrants against native-born Americans. How Americans are divided does not matter, so long as they are put at conflict. Perceived “income inequality” spawns a politics of envy.
- Create scapegoats. Identify persons who can be blamed for all grievances, both legitimate and imagined. These include President Trump, white people generally, Christians and “vast right-wing conspiracies.”
- Spawn chaos.Uncontrolled riots and looting foster uncertainty and instability. Moreover, they make current leaders appear either indecisive if they fail to control the violence, or as oppressors if they subdue it.
- Establish a movement. “Give a virtuous veneer to a sordid agenda with mass appeal,” Taunton writes, so no one can say that they oppose the movement. (Enter Black Lives Matter, with its Marxist-trained founders.)
- Provoke retaliation. Taunt and ridicule opponents until they lash back, then focus on their reaction as discrediting both them and their cause. Familiar recent examples include protestors vilifying police, hoping to incite reactions that then are filmed and offered as “proof” of “police brutality.”
- Disseminate disinformation. As Taunton relates, “[m]aintain an unrelenting campaign of public disinformation while accusing your enemies of deception.… Keep them busy defending themselves while you move forward with your plans.”
- Waste no crisis. Alinsky stresses that radicals must maintain flexibility and capitalize on opportunities as they may arise. A classic example: blaming President Trump for the COVID-19 epidemic and resulting economic injury.
- Overwhelm the system: Maintain constant, unrelenting pressure and eclipse the administrative capabilities of the government to cope with the problem. The purposeful chaos at the U.S. southern border in which caravans of immigrants seek “asylum” while “sanctuary” U.S. cities attempt to protect illegal immigrants from federal law enforcement exemplifies this tactic.
- Seize power: As Tauton explains, “[t]his is done by presenting yourself as the solution to the chaos you created. Your bargain with the public is essentially this: you will have no rest until we are in power.” Examples include the Democratic Party’s threat that the riots will continue and intensify until after the election, and the recurring Black Lives Matter chant “No justice, no peace.”
Riots Calculated to Bring America to “Crisis”
This backdrop frames the current escalating riots as an attempt by the radical left to bring America to the “crisis” stage of subversion coinciding with the November 3, 2020, election. The call to “defund” and “reimagine” policing aligns with this objective, amplifying general anxiety and instability. As the Claremont Institute’s Matthew J. Peterson recently argued in his article “The Democrat Party’s Riots” in The American Mind, the party cannot disown these riots now that their intensity and violence have escalated: “You built this. You refused to condemn it. You asked for this.” (See https://americanmind.org/post/the-democrats-riots/.)
In August 2020 historian Victor Davis Hanson stated that Joe Biden had struck a “devil’s bargain” with the radical left, and that the Democratic Party had mortgaged its soul to sponsor chaos on America’s streets in the hope of generating political capital. And in a hearing recently before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr challenged any Democrat member to denounce burning a federal courthouse. None responded.
The choice in November 2020 is not between Donald Trump and a candidate with a more conventional personality. Neither Ronald Reagan nor John F. Kennedy is on the ballot. Instead, the choice is between a free, economically vibrant America, with vast horizons and unrealized potential, and a dark, impoverished state peopled by classes of putative oppressors and victims, obsessed with contrived grievances and reparations, disavowing God, and deprived of every precious civil liberty and property right that our Constitution has guaranteed for the past 233 years and for which countless American patriots have died.
Download the PDF of this Article to Share with others HERE
Note: The authors are not part of any U.S. political campaign or any political action committee.