US Political & Civil War, Current Literature

 Peter Switzer 2022 in his book Red Handed, wrote:

“From the beginning of our country, there have been deep concerns that foreign money and corruption would be used to buy off America’s aristocracy. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers #22, argued, “One of the weak sides of republics, among their numerous advantages, is that they afford too easy an inlet to foreign corruption” The Founders assumed that foreign rivals—especially Great Britain—would look for opportunities to weaken and divide us by striking deals with members of American high society. George Washington echoed those concerns in his farewell address, speaking of the “insidious wiles of foreign influence,” which he considered “the most baneful foes of republican government.” Likewise, James Madison was wary of foreign influence operating in the corridors of American politics and the business elite. “The public attention has been much employed for some time, on the danger of foreign influence,” he wrote in 1799. “To be honorable to our character, and adequate to our safety, it ought to be pointed to every quarter where danger lurks, and most awake to that, from which danger is most to be feared.” Madison believed the business elite were vulnerable because the British Crown had money to throw around: “Being an absolute monarchy in its executive department, [Britain] can distribute its money for secret services with every advantage of safety and success.” 

The fears for our Republic of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and James Madison become reality today, if one dares to look behind the political façade. Remember the words Thomas Paine read to George Washington’s troops before crossing the Delaware River on Christmas Day in a snow storm - to surprise and rout the British army. The victory in Trenton, turned the tide for American freedom. The American Crisis, Dec. 23, 1776, “These are the times that try men’s soles… Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon…. freedom…. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to tax) but “to bind us in all cases whatsoever…..Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.”

Did Star Trek add yet another avenue for teaching neo-liberal political correctness to our youth. Star Trek economics: A back episode of Star Trek on YouTub promoting a new movie, shows the Star Ship Enterprise finding, cryogenically frozen persons, from the 60s. Upon recovery, one overbearing tycoon demands access to his brokerage accounts. Captain Picard explains to the gentleman, 

“In the past 300 years, people are no longer obsessed with things. The need for processions grew out of our infancy.” 

“You got it all wrong. It has never been about processions. It’s about power.”

“Power to do what?”

“To control your life, your destiny.”

“That kind of control is an illusion. “

“Really. I’m here aren’t I? I should be dead, but I’m not. Look what happened to us. There’s no trace of my money. My office is gone. What will I do? How will I live?” 

“This is the 24th century. Material needs no longer exist.”

“Then what’s the challenge?”

“The challenge Mr H, is to improve yourself, to enrich yourself.”

Liberal Globalism in the modern era promises socialism and, as of necessity, authoritative leadership. Why did young people so embrace the utopian scheme of globalism? Comic books defined the morality of a generation. For the millennials, Star Trek’s futuristic utopia may be one answer, but in Star Trek’s 300 year future, war and evil still live. 

Is now the time of the so-called  forth turning? Will such a socialistic dream of equality and abundance as voiced by Captain Picard ever be possible? Or, will our civilization go the way of others only to re-emerge like China, or as a Chinese colony, or some other dystopian dictatorship? Or will the forth turning be a turn away from the failed Utopia of global citizenship and back towards an embracing our worlds many civilizations. Cold War vs..see below

Can we grow pride in our unique cultures, rediscover cooperation, assimilate the minorities and most of all regain trust and loyalty with one another? We crave these things instinctively. It’s in our DNA. We fight politically over how to get there.

During the Korean war, I was a survival instructor with a mission of teaching bomber crews how to survive in the Siberian Arctic, resist interrogation, escape, evade and set up a viable means of communication and extraction. This was all highly classified. It included recovery from one way missions, part of the Strategic Air Command’s war plan. North Korea transferred, our downed American pilots, to the Russians for interrogation. Russia moved these prisoners through the rail head at Khasan, to the Russian interior for interrogation and brain washing. Many were never seen again. The Air Force gave much thought to the adverse effects of brainwashing and the security risks that brainwashing presented. Some prisoners actually escaped. Others were eventually returned. What were the after effects and loyalties following cultural reeducation and experimental chemicals? These concerns survived the war in Vietnam, and the concern extended to American youth and students throughout and subsequent to the Vietnam war and anti Vietnam demonstrations and rioting. The risks arose from subversive education,  corruption of popular culture and the media, the Jane Fonda phenomena. Robert Jay Lifton in 1961 wrote an extensive study of these after effects, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A study of “Brainwashing.”  Lifton compared mass brainwashing hysteria to the individual brainwashing of our pilots and concluded that recovery was possible once life returned to normal with family, support systems and traditional values. Subversion, cultural reeducation, hate and corruption of popular media persists today, as does Jane Fonda.

The Crisis of Democracy a book derived from a report to the Trilateral Commission in 1975 outlining the growing problem with the governability of democracies.  Michael Crozier,  Samuel P. Huntington, Joni Watanuki expanded their initial paper to full text describing what they called increasing demands on government and peoples’ lack of compliance and cooperation with government. The tone trended to the authoritarian and supported an autocratic role for an unelected NGO seeking cooperation initially between Europe, Japan and America but soon included other nations. Multilateral trade at any cost for this elitist group left the US with a minority vote from an elitist group dominating the cabinet of every administration until Trump. The Crisis of Democracy helped establish the “Deep State” and the totalitarian nature of Globalization. The report and the book may still be the academic seed of an idea for a regressive governance to displace representative government by and for the people. While the Crisis of Democracy questions the governability of a democracy, the problem might better question democracies ability to represent the people.

Love Letter to America, Thomas Schuman, actually Yuri Bezmenov (KGB defector) 1984 wrote of the four stages of communist idealogical subversion and how such strategy causes an enemy to destroy itself from within. As the US devolved into the crisis and chaos stage of subversion, China bought political influence with widespread espionage and promoted globalism as their road to world domination. The Marxists were not alone in securing power and profit from the chaos, however.

Writing in 1992, Christopher Lash sets forth The Betrayal of Democracy by a privileged class that’s lost touch with Americans and the meaning of both Democracy and citizenship. Lush’s book, The Revolt of the Elites, posed the question in Chapter 4, does Democracy deserve to survive? He paints a picture of the chaos, the decline of the middle class, of manufacturing, loss of jobs, the poor, rising crime, drugs and decay of cities. He ends the chapter with the observation that democracy from the single-mindedly obsessed political views of racism and fanaticism, can mean only one thing, “the Defence of what they call cultural diversity.“ 

Unrestricted Warfare, China’s Master Plan to Destroy America, Qiao Lang, Wang Xiangsui, February 1, 1999, PLA Publishing House, Beijing. Their book begins with an accurate appraisal of the US military, its strengths, weaknesses including detailed analysis of our command and control structure and our struggle against asymmetric warfare.The language and structure resembles what which one might hear in our own War College. The authors refer to Sun Tzu’s Art of War as the prototype for war without physical combat. From a quote by Oioa, “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” The book is not modest in outlining the extensive alternative weapons to use against the West especially the U.S. Diverse strategies including: hacking, propaganda, bribery, economic overproduction, deception, theft, espionage, educational and ideological subversion, and geographic expansion like a game of GO. Was COVID19 a bio weapon? “If people use information-guided bio-weapons to attack a bio-computer, should this be counted as bio-warfare or information warfare?”(page 18) If no other, this work is a must read. The book is studied today in our military academies.

Plague of Corruption, Judy Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively, 2020. Judy Mikovits is the researcher who identified the mouse virus contaminedcontaminating early polio vaccines and causing Chronic Fatigue Symptom and maybe Autism in children. She writes about the criminal assaults directed by big pharmaceutical companies against her in an attempt to silence her. She lists the authoritarian interests in suppressing free speech, free speculation and the scientific method. The book shows the extent of corruption throughout our health care system and the way the top down authoritarianism, a byproduct and necessary feature of globalism lead to adverse consequences. 

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in economics, now an author, columnist and political commentator. She is the editor in chief of the online magazine, The Federalist. The magazine inherits its passion for the Constitution from The Federalist Papers, a collection of 85 articles written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay promoting the ratification of our Constitution. Hemingway in her new book Rigged, Oct 12, 2021, documents facts underlying corruption in the 2020 election. Dismissed as conspiracy theory by the Attorney General, FBI, the judiciary and the media, the well established theory becomes well established in the literature and thus in history. Mollie was there, a respected journalist. She documents corrupt behaviors of oligarchs, election officials, the media, and the FBI. 

Batya Ungar-Sargo is an American journalist and deputy opinion editor of Newsweek magazine. Sargon also writes for the New York Times, Washington Post and Foreign Policy. Batya Ungar-Sargon in her book,  Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, October 26, 2021, writes about present day problems with the main stream media. The first chapter alone on Pulitzer and his passion for, writing for the people, makes the point of journalistic integrity. The author writes with a Dickensian eloquence. The book outlines the wealth, privilege and education of today’s young journalists who embrace racism and critical race theory while ignoring and belittling the working class and American people of all races. Wokeness - itself a derogatory defamation of speech — pleads, defund the police and open borders both to the detriment of those wokeness is said to protect. Ungar-Sargon pleads for journalists to return to Pulitzer’s devotion to, afflicting the powerful and protecting the afflicted. A chapter outlines the obscene wealth concentrated with the elite, indifferent to the resulting poverty of the working and consumer class. Batya paints a picture of class divide rather than racial divide. Hopefully this book will serve as an inflection point for journalistic integrity.

Rick Atkinson, an author of five books, worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post before focusing on military history. Rick Atkinson captures the frustration experienced by the Colonists and their passion to be free of excess taxation, arbitrary authoritarian rule without civil rights or ownership. His book, The British are Coming: the war for America, Paints the revolution in meticulous detail, gives flesh to the history books and reads as a metaphor to our struggles today. The story comes as a kaleidoscope of historical letters, notes and deeply researched history. The detail and trivia take on a life of their own. The vocabulary and idiom both voice the language of 1776 and the passion for freedom and self rule. Not the whole story by any means, but Atkinson provides the reader with a living presence in the battles, failures and successes through the Summer, Fall and Winter of 1776. He includes the words of Thomas Paine, read to the troops before Washington, and a determined force of ragged men, crosse the Delaware River in a snow storm on Christmas Day to surprise and defeat The British in the battle of Trenton. “These are the times that try men’s soles, etc.” Words not at all inappropriate for today’s sad state of globalism and now war in Ukraine, not to mention, taxes, inflation, censorship, propaganda, loss of due process and arbitrary incarceration. 

Victor Davis Hanson teaches military history, ancient warfare and the classics at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is a professor emeritus at California State University, and a frequent visiting professor at Hillsdale College. His book, The Dying Citizen, Oct 2021, traces citizenship from Ancient Greece through its rare appearance through history and around the world. Today, citizenship exists only in the Western democracies. Hanson holds the middle class as the driving force of citizenship. From his book, “Without a middle class, a society becomes bifurcated. It splinters into one of modern masters and peasants. The role of government no longer ensures freedom but provides for the poor and exempts the wealthy who in turn enrich and empower the governing class.”

Robert F Kennedy Jr, son of Bobby Kennedy, is as liberal as they come. Harvard graduate, economics degree from the London School of Economics, JD from the University of Virgenia and environmental lawyer, Kennedy founded in 1999, and still directs, the Water Keeper Alliance. Yet, Wikipedia calls him an author known for anti vaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories. Kennedy actually writes more about the corruption between big pharmacology and government agencies, not just during the pandemic, but extending back to experimental drug treatments in Africa for TB, malaria, AIDS and polio. His book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the War on Democracy and Public Health, 2021, levels harsh criticism at what Kennedy sees as sloppy, corrupt and self serving science. Whether true or not his doubts deserve further scientific inquiry. Neither profit, nor politics serve either science or patient care.

United States of Fear by Mark McDonald, M.D. November 21, calls further attention to the bureaucratic dictation of patient care during the pandemic for obvious personal and drug company gain, as though the patient did not know or the physician could not deviate from bureaucratic guidelines. McDonald tells the history of big pharma’s abuse and the struggle physicians have with so called evidence based guidelines and politicalization of medicine. McDonald calls the fear mongering of politics and greed, a mass delusional psychosis. His psychiatric practice and years as an analyst supports his diagnosis. “Adopting a world view that rejects and attacks reality is psychotic.”

The illusion of evidence based medicine, a recent opinion in the prestigious British Medical Journal, 2022;376:o702, Jon Jureidini, Leemon B. McHenry. “Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialization of academia.”

Peter Schweitzer in his book, Red Handed, Jan 2022, bravely outlines the extent to which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) seduced the Washington elite and many others throughout America. The elite  followed willingly the siren call for unlimited wealth and adulation. Schweitzer outlines the double dipping of many legislators, who in retirement, become high paid lobbyists for China and more directly the CCP. He described how Cabinet members, diplomats and even retired military engage in the same consulting businesses that initially in the 60s sought engagement, trade and peace, but soon turned to vicious subversion. For the Silicon Valley technocracy, the market opportunity for sales to China’s 1.44 billion population was initially an irresistible siren call above all other considerations, and for most of these corporations, the profits outweighed any thoughts of national security. The Author included Wall Street financing of the Chinese military with investment products not accountable to our Securities Exchange Commission, including many retirement funds. Schweitzer goes on to describe the Bush and Trudeau families’ close relations with Chinese officials of the CCP. Don’t  forget Senator Dianne Feinstein or Senator Mitch McConnell and the Chao family of ship builders. Schwartz focuses particularly on Yale University with the massive and mostly unaccounted for Chinese donations and joint programs. This book names names, dates and dollar amounts with a surprisingly long list of persons who’s greed forgoes their honor.  He names a few not so easily seduced. The last chapter makes suggestions: Ban lobbying on behalf of Chinese military- and intelligence-linked companies. Ban Chinese military- and intelligence-linked companies from appearing on US stock exchanges. Ban joint research between Chinese and American universities.  Ban investment in corporations with Chinese military and intelligence projects. Schweitzer suggests, Wall Street firms need to consistently apply Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), SEC standards and National security to all Chinese investments.Truth remains a challenge for Main Street media, owned or financed by China. The CCP owns Hollywood as well.James Mann is the former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times and is now a scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He argues that “engagement” is essentially a strategic fraud. Clyde Prestowitz, a longtime observer and author on Chinese matters, believes that we should replace engagement with reciprocity. (However, reciprocity cannot exist when one party holds deception as the highest good while the other views truth as the guiding virtue — the Eastern mind set versus the West.)

Schweizer mentions the unlikely but hopeful agreement between Ted Cruz of Texas and Chuck Schumer of NY in upholding the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and the 1966-2019 Foreign Contributions and Things of Value Act, § 30121 & 303(2). Schweizer seems to endorse Prestowitz’s view of “reciprocity in Lou of engagement,” and our hope for further agreement between Ted Cruz (R) and Chuck Schumer (D) in closing the loopholes. In any case we must counter Beijing’s “elite capture strategy.”

Education, additionally, remains a disconnect with an absence of virtue, discipline, logic and civility. Alana Mastrangelo, 3/17/22, writing for Breitbart:  “Nearly 120 woke Yale Law School students disrupted a bipartisan panel about civil liberties last week by trying to shout down and intimidate the speakers — primarily attacking a speaker from Alliance Defending Freedom —who had to be escorted out of the building by police. One of America’s best and brightest future Ivy League graduates screeched at the ADF representative: “I will literally fight you, bitch!”

Ever since Vietnam, our political system and shadow government waged and continues to wage “unrestricted war,” not Democrat against Republican; although, that appears most visible, but globalist against nationalist. If America and the Constitution win, a wall of hatred will remain, much like the post Civil War reconstruction. Both political parties can be forgiven because their humanitarian goals were hijacked by Globalization. Any post Ukraine reconstruction will of necessity require great leadership from both parties. Democrats, however, do not have an apparent reconstruction style leader; they no longer have an Andrew Jackson to lead an academic renaissance. Mending our way to a cooperative post globalist and post war, will be a challenge. It will, furthermore, require generations of education and civility to overcome decades of hate and chaos.