At the start of this school year, Washington and Lee University history professor Matt Gilder gave his students an assignment; produce a manifesto on how to overthrow a government. Some people objected because they feared these types of intellectual exercises could plant the seeds of an eventual insurrection in our country.
Those people were dismissed as paranoid because it would be impossible to overthrow the United States government with direct armed insurgency. Our military is too big and powerful. So, how would one overthrow the United States government? If you study the last 50 year of American society, you will see a case study in how to do so. The insurgency would have to come from within not from without, and it would look something like this.
1. Take control of the media. Get the majority of the media promoting your agenda and ideology, and attack anyone who disagrees with you. Have the media shed the guise of unbiased journalism, and openly promote your political agenda.
2. Take over the artistic culture; movies, television, and music. Turn “artistic” expressions into propaganda for your political agenda rather than an insightful commentary on the human condition.
3. Take over academia to indoctrinate the youth to your ideology. Have high school teachers and college professors teach students what to think—your ideologies, and not how to think—being objective, unbiased, rational.
4. Take control of the technology that disseminates information. Have social media promote your ideology, and spread fake news stories and false narratives about those who oppose you.
5. Censor speech contrary to your ideology. Cancel individuals who express ideas different from you. Create hate speech laws that will be used to censor speech that you do not like.
6. Change the language. Hijack, and change the definition of key terms to make your ideology more palatable, and paint your opponents’ ideas as wrong and hateful.
7. Infiltrate the intelligence agencies, FBI and CIA, at the highest levels and weaponize them against your political opponents. Turn these agencies into your political operatives.
8. Tear down cultural norms. Destroy the concept of family through no-fault divorce, tolerating adultery, promoting single parent households, normalizing promiscuity and pornography.
9. Marginalize religious institutions. Remove God, the idea of a higher being from all public institutions. Claim that human rights come from the state, not endowed by our Creator.
10. Destroy the concept of morality. Remove right and wrong from society by perverting the concept of tolerance. Label anyone who believes in right and wrong, as “hateful” and “intolerant”. Promote the concept, “if it feels good, then it is good”.
11. Destroy the sanctity of human life. Allow people to have the power to choose whether another human life has the right to live through abortion and eugenics. Promote the idea that human life is only valuable if it is “wanted”.
12. Denigrate the founding of the country and the founding principles by vilifying the founders. Focus on the founders’ personal moral failings in an attempt to destroy our founding principles through an ad hominin attack.
13. Discredit the Constitution, and the rights therein by claiming that it is a “living document” that is mutable and malleable by judicial activist, and charge anyone who stands up for “Originalism” as bigoted, racist and hateful.
14. Promote class warfare. Pit rich vs poor. Claim the “maldistribution of wealth” is proof of the unfairness of the system. Condemn capitalism as a zero-sum game and not a meritocracy that provides the greatest opportunities for upward mobility, and the highest standard of living in the world for all.
15. Create a race war by fanning the flames of racial division in the country. Make dubious charges of “white privilege” and “institutional racism” without tangible evidence. Use individual examples of racism as proof that the entire society is “systemically racist.” Tolerate and enable race riots in major cities, and justify them as “peaceful protest”.
16. Create a gender war. Pit men vs women. Make up a false narrative about a so-called “war on women” in the culture. Project the crimes that a small percentage of men commit against women onto every man in the culture in order to degrade the concept of manhood. Attack people by their gender, creating a false-concepts such as “toxic masculinity.”
17. Undermine the rule of law by promoting sanctuary cities and the tolerance of illegal activity. Blame lawlessness and crime on the structures of society and not on the individuals breaking the law. Give criminals built-in excuses for committing crimes such as poverty and “systemic racism”. Destroy confidence in law enforcement and undercut police officers’ ability to enforce the law through initiatives such as “defund the police”.
18. Promote the dissemination of the drug culture by promoting decriminalizing mind altering drugs. Allow drugs to flow easily across the border to permeate society which poisons the minds of the youth, promotes criminality, and destroys the fabric of our societies.
19. Disarm the populace. Take guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens which in turn promotes and produces greater levels of crime and violence throughout society, and more victims.
20. Promote open borders and unfettered illegal immigration to drive down wages, drive up unemployment, overwhelm the welfare state, and destroy the concept of country. Charge anyone who supports strong borders as racist and xenophobic.
All of this is designed to tear down the structures of the culture and the society to the studs, so they can rebuild it through the lens of their leftist/Marxist prism. This has been done throughout the last one hundred years of history.
Marxists living in Germany during World War I believed that the war was a good thing because it would destroy the existing economic systems in Europe and usher in world-wide Marxism.
In 1968, two sociologists from Columbia University named Richard Cloward and Frances Previn, followers of the philosophies of Karl Marx, believed a basic universal income was best at combatting poverty. They believed the only way lawmakers would adopt a basic universal income was if the current welfare system was proven unsustainable. So, they recruited as many people as they could to sign up for welfare to overload and destroy the welfare system.
Yes, the system became overloaded. No, we never instituted a universal basic income. What we did get was a permanent underclass. People who have become so dependent on the government, they see no way out. Generations of people’s lives have been destroyed by two people who believed that they can manipulate the system to get what they desired.
This is what leftists and Marxist do. They intentionally tear down the system by artificially attacking the core structures, and use their-induced collapse of the system as evidence that the system itself does not work so they can usher in their system which no one would even consider if the existing system had not been destroyed by them. Cloward and Previn’s plan destroyed the inner-cities and many minorities communities, and now those devastating effects which still hover over these communities to this day are blamed on “institutional racism” and “white privilege” rather than another failed leftist experiment.
The market rarely produces the conditions where Communism becomes a plausible solution, so the Marxists must tear down the system to create the conditions to institute their socialist agenda. They destroy the existing system and then ride in on the white horse of Communism with the solution. But that is not a white horse, it’s a unicorn, a myth, a fantasy. And that is not a horn, it’s a sword, ready and willing to impale anyone not willing to climb on board.
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Judd Garrett is a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He is a frequent contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.