Ghosts of Revolutions Past and Warnings of Futures to Come

 Have ever been listening to someone talk and have déjà vu, despite the fact that you’ve never seen or heard of the person speaking, and the interview you’re watching happened just a few hours ago?  I have. Once.  A couple of weeks ago.

I was listening to Tucker interview Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese native who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China.  She eventually immigrated to the United States and has lived here for 40 years.  As I’m listening to her talk about how the Cultural Revolution rolled out and how she was seeing many of the same things here I couldn’t help but think that I’d heard something close to this before.

And then it hit me, I had.  Exactly 40 years ago a defector from the Soviet Union, Yuri Bezmenov did an interview about how the KGB was using what they called Ideological Subversion to collapse the United States.

Now these two interviews weren’t remotely the same.  One was from an KGB operative, someone who was part of the suppression of the Russian people who became disillusioned and defected to the west while the other is from someone who experienced the suppression of the CCP and eventually immigrated to the US. 

Nonetheless, given exactly 40 years apart, the two interviews taken together paint a very stark picture of America today and going forward.  They reminded me of a technique that is often recommended for effective public speaking: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell them what you’ve just told them.”

Bezmenov lays out the KGB’s plan – Ideological subversion – for sowing the collapse of America – and western Europe as well.   It involved 4 elements. He lays each one out in detail, or at least three of them while 3# is obvious.

1)      1) Demoralization – 15-20 years.  Time to re-educate one generation.

This is done through uncritically introducing the Marxist ideology into schools without counterbalancing it with basic American values, patriotism, and morals. Eventually a significant segment of the population will become immune to accurate information. 

2)      2) Destabilization – 2 – 5 years to destabilize a nation.

The goal is to destabilize the nation via the economy, foreign relations, and defense policy. 

3)      3) Crisis – as short as 6 weeks to bring a nation to crisis. (George Floyd anyone…)

4)     4) Normalization – For this one I’ll let Bezmenov’s words speak for themselves:

“This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schumcks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind of goodies and paradise on earth.  To destabilize your economy and illuminate the principle of free market competition and to put a big brother government in Washington DC with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale. 

Your leftists in the United States, all the professors and the beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion.  Only to destabilize the nation.  When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore.  They know too much.  Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxists / Leninists come power they get offended they think they will come to power.  That will never happen of course.  They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

That last sentence is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what Xi Van Fleet says happened in China, twice.  The first was the peasants who put Mao in power in the first place.  They were repaid for their efforts by being chained to their farms and between 1958 and 1962 fifty million of them starved to death.  Then, in 1969 three years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao turned on his Red Guards, the children, literally, who were his stormtroopers and had the military either kill them or send them to re-education camps. 

Her story is a tragic one, but as she walks through it you hear echoes of exactly what is happening in America today.  For Mao, after 16 years of brainwashing the children he sent them (the Red Guards) out to terrorize the nation.  Violence was used, but also the control of the language. Suddenly propaganda was everywhere.  Everything old had to be destroyed while law and order was dismantled and the police were told to stay out of the schools, which were the beating heart of the Revolution, and additionally, if any of the Red Guards struck them, the police were prohibited from reacting. 

All of this resembles the indoctrination of two generations of American students in the fiction of Climate Change, the gay and trans agendas, as well as the manipulation of language and discourse via the prohibition of words and ideas. The tearing down of statues. The defund the police movement, the violence after George Floyd and the lack of consequences for criminal behavior are exactly as Xi described.

Whether it’s climate activists, supporters of Palestine – AKA antisemites, LBTQXYZ123# harassers or Antifa & BLM rampaging through cities, they’re all playing their parts in the play written by the KGB and taken over by western Communists after the Berlin Wall collapsed.  What’s more, both of these refugees from tyranny discuss what America is becoming, he predicted it and she’s chronicling it. Whether it’s reporters being arrested or protesters being sent to the gulag, or rich / popular opponents of the regime being harassed via lawfare, the rules never apply to those in power.  It’s not that there are no rules, they just don’t matter.  The Soviets had a constitution that guaranteed a wide variety of civil liberties, and the Chinese constitution guarantees "citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration." We have our Constitution which provides about as much of a limit on government as a spaghetti strainer does on water.    

The funny thing (as in not really funny) about all of this is that the leftists who think they’re going to be running things once the crisis blossoms into a full blown tyranny will likely be the first to go.  Whether Stalin’s erstwhile supporters who fell in the Great Purge or the Chinese Red Guards who fell to the guns of the military, those who are at the vanguard of leftist revolutions often find themselves victims of the very power they put in place. 

As we watch our great cities devolve into crime infested dystopian nightmares, as we watch George Soros impelled DAs and prosecutors smile as they demonstrate their two tiered legal system, as we watch as the federal government actively subverts efforts to secure the border and cities cut services to citizens and veterans in order to gift illegals billions, as we watch schools and hospitals and states empower the brainwashing and butchering of children, and a we watch powerlessly as the Uniparty in Washington runs up trillion dollar deficits and sends tens of billions to Ukraine, we begin to recognize what Bezmenov called Normalization.  A decade ago Americans of most stripes would have understood that all of this was a disaster in the making.  But now we’re told that all of it is not only normal, but you’re a racist, homophobic, transphobic white nationalist if you disagree with any of it. 

The outcome in November will decide which path we take.  The thing to remember when we walk into those voting booths is that Bezmenov and Xi had a place to escape to for freedom, America.  We don’t have that luxury.  Vote accordingly.

Ronald Reagan said: “If you want more of something, subsidize it" That Apparently Includes Unemployment!

 Eight years ago I wrote a post titled:  Can A Nation Built By Giants Survive Nanny State Paternalism? The Numbers Don't Look Good...  In it I wrote:

“ Were the Americans who carved a nation out of a continent, who crisscrossed that continent with railroads, telephone lines and highways and who won two world wars so different than Americans today… Not based on DNA they weren’t. But that doesn’t mean they were the same. While the DNA of the American people today is no different than that of the people who invented the elevator or the light bulb, the American people writ large certainly appear to be”.

The piece goes on to talk about the staggering changes in the makeup of the American workforce in terms of numbers of people actually working vs the number living off of government largesse.  I observed:  “If the record of the last 40 years were to be repeated over the next 40, in 2050 the country would have 260 million workers supporting 43 million people on disability and 450 million people on food stamps.”

It turns out that I was off by a few decades…

The last year saw what may turn out to be the most cataclysmic mutation of American society in our history.  Not only did the Democrats take Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste” maxim to heart, they put it on steroids.  They took a virus and turned into a catastrophe of epic proportions.

At the state level, from New York to Michigan to California, mini tyrants used the virus to strangle small business as the governors put their boots on the necks of their citizens.   At the national level Joe Biden has shifted government spending into overdrive. 

To put that spending into perspective, in March and April of 2020 when the pandemic was taking off and the United States lost 22 million jobs, president Trump signed a $2.2 trillion stimulus bill to keep the country on track.  He signed another $2 trillion over the next eight months as the economy found its footing and recovered 12 million of those jobs.  In his three months in office, when the nation added more than 1.5 million jobs, with demand spiking and prices surging, Joe Biden has signed into law or proposed $8 Trillion in new spending. 

Spending $4 trillion of dollars that the government doesn’t have when the economy is in freefall with more than 20 million Americans losing their jobs may be defensible, but spending $8 trillion when the economy is starting to overheat is simply ludicrous.

The proof of the folly is all around.  Across the country businesses are finding it almost impossible to hire staff, and those who can are doing so at much higher costs than they would normally pay.  Why?  Government, of course.  Businesses have to compete with supplemental unemployment payments that in Mississippi, the state with the lowest unemployment benefits in the union, equals $535 per week ($235 + $300 supplemental) which works out to the equivalent of $13.37 an hour in a state where the minimum wage is $7.25.(Within the last few days a dozen states – including Mississippi - have decided to leave the federal unemployment benefits program.)   In Massachusetts, where the minimum wage is $13.50 the total unemployment benefit works out to the equivalent of $28.20.  This spike in labor costs is even worse than it sounds because as businesses struggle to find workers, the higher wages necessary to attract them drive an increase in prices, which in turn tamps down demand for their offerings in the first place.

This tragedy is particularly difficult for small businesses who have taken the brunt of the damage in this economic meltdown with in excess of 2 million closing up shop and almost 10 million not sure they will survive.  Large companies like Amazon, Home Depot, Wal Mart and others have not only survived the pandemic, they’ve thrived from it.  Sadly, small businesses, who have traditionally been the life’s blood of the American economy, have not been so fortunate.  While large businesses often have the finances or flexibility to deal with surging labor costs, small businesses rarely do.  And labor typically makes up a much bigger cost of operations for small companies than it does for large firms who often can harness technology, scale and outsourcing to minimize labor costs.  For restaurants, karate classess, beauty shops and most small businesses, labor is often the biggest expense and the primary vehicle through which they deliver their services.

What we have in 2021 is a continuation of the Emanuel maxim. Last year Democrats used it to lay the groundwork for stealing the election and now they’re using it to drive their fundamental socialist goal:  The destruction of American small business. 

Small businesses represent solutions, opportunity and most of all, individual freedom, all things Democrats despise because they don’t look to government for direction.  Big business on the other hand, as Coke, Delta, Disney and myriad others have recently demonstrated, can be counted on to pick up the Democrat standard and run with it, much like Wal Mart and McDonalds did when they supported the passage of Obamacare.

Beyond the businesses themselves, small businessmen and women are a problem for Democrats.  By definition they are entrepreneurs, people who want to build something, want to be in control of their destinies and as such lean towards smaller government and the GOP.  Given that the Democrat Party is the party of government largesse, of government regulation and ultimately, government control, a crisis that disproportionately harms small businesses while growing the power and influence of the state is seen by them as a win-win proposition.  Look no further than their collusion with the teacher’s unions on the opening of schools to understand that it’s not what’s good for citizens that’s important, but rather, what’s good for the party and their donors. 

All of this came into stark view last week when the news that the economy added a mere 266,000 jobs in April when the expectation was for over 1 million.  That number, when combined with the tidal wave of help wanted signs across the country clearly demonstrates that Americans are indeed motivated not to work. Joe Biden scoffed at such notions:  “Americans want to work” he said.  Maybe not:  Bank of America estimates that anyone who earned $32,000 before the pandemic can now get more from a combination of state and federal unemployment benefits. They are also allowed to claim benefits for up to 39 weeks - nearly a full year - whereas before, it was capped at 26 weeks. The average US salary in 2019 was $31,133.

Which brings us back to the notion of a nation built by giants.  For most of our history, Americans very much had a “can do” spirit.  They carved a nation out of forest, rock and through deserts while fighting the elements, Indians, the English, Spanish, Mexicans and even one another.  Americans built the Transcontinental Railroad in six years, the Golden Gate Bridge in four and the Empire State Building in 410 days. Today however, Democrats have Americans cowering in their homes, requiring masks on the chance they’re given permission to emerge and looking to the government for their incomes. The virus provided Democrats with a perfect storm of opportunity to finish what they started half a century ago, turning a nation of giants into a nation of vassals where life, liberty and dollars are doled out in exchange for supplication to the Democrat Party. Never let a crisis go to waste, indeed.