Liars (33 page)

• The government does not totally control the labor movement, either, but it's worth nothing that Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO,
visited the White House 104 times between 2009 and 2014. Instead of “control,” it's likely more of a partnership.

• Today's government does not underwrite employment to the degree that Chase suggested, but the Obama administration's stimulus package could be regarded as a failed attempt to do just that.

• One of the most specific items is the establishment of “youth corps” to instill government ideology. Chase specifically mentioned the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which ceased to exist in 1942. It's hard to find a direct analogue today, but some alert Americans may have noticed similarities in 2012, when the administration created the FEMA Corps. Americans ages eighteen to twenty-four could sign up for training in “disaster preparedness,
response, and recovery.” That is a benign enough goal, but the imagery of their graduation ceremony—photos showing rows of American youths wearing identical uniforms emblazoned with “FEMA Corps” seated before a giant government
logo as they listened with rapt attention to a “deputy administrator”—
conjured up some unpleasant associations.

As it happened, Chase's own influence in government waned after World War II. His service in the Roosevelt administration wound up being the apex of his career. In 1956, he found himself with enough spare time to join the planning commission of his hometown of Redding, Connecticut. In 1961, he traveled with other “American intellectual leaders” to Russia—more than thirty years after the visit when his group had been “bowled over” by Stalin in order to help “
seek better understanding” with the Cold War foe. And he surfaced again to lend his support to Johnson's Great Society agenda.

When Chase died in 1985 at age ninety-seven, he was, according to the
New York Times
, “one of the last surviving members of the small group of advisers who helped President Roosevelt shape the New Deal.” The
Times
further memorialized him as “an outspoken advocate of Government planning and
intervention in the economy.”

It's pretty remarkable how well someone writing in 1942 predicted the current state of the American government and economy. But it's less remarkable when you think about the gradualism that is so essential to the Fabian socialism Chase embraced first and the progressivism he adopted later. The ends justify the means. He knew the revolution would not be achieved with any one shock to the system or international crisis. It had to take place over time. Year after year. Wave after wave. It had to seem organic, as if it was something that the American people themselves desired. He knew that if the progressives stuck around long enough, they would eventually triumph.

While Chase was certainly a visionary, his vision—at least, that which he published—was incomplete. With Political System X, he captured a central part of the grand progressive plan. But we need to widen the lens a bit and look further out to see what America might look like once we get there.

i
. Reed would become a useful propaganda tool for the Bolshevik regime in subsequent years. He was lionized by Hollywood in Warren Beatty's 1981 film, Reds.

I
have studied progressivism extensively; this book represents just a fraction of my research. One thing I've learned is that progressives hold their playbooks close, and they've done so from the beginning. It takes digging to uncover nuggets like Stuart Chase's road map. But after taking in the whole picture, I believe I've pieced together the grand progressive strategy.

But remember, progressives are not only strategic but also persistent. You probably noticed that we organized part I of this book into “waves.” As Charles Kesler, a Claremont professor and scholar of progressivism, notes, progressivism is best understood as a metaphor of waves, “interrupted by wars and by
rather haphazard reactions to modern liberalism's excesses.”

For Wilson, there was Coolidge. For FDR, there were Eisenhower and JFK. For Johnson, there was Reagan. The good news for us is that this means that good leaders can stop, or at least slow down, progressivism.

The question remains whether there will be someone or some movement to push back the fourth wave of progressivism of Obama and whoever follows him. As we'll see, this wave threatens to inundate America, creating the political turmoil that Chase predicted as an interim stage before America becomes a socialist utopia unrecognizable from its founding.

There are three main phases to the progressive plan: organization and infiltration, sowing political turmoil, and Political System X.

Phase I was the genesis of the modern progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was launched by the cast of characters we covered at the beginning of this book, people such as Teddy Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Margaret Sanger, Wayne Wheeler, John Dewey, and others. It got especially heated during the 1912 presidential election, when Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson tried to out-progressive each other. Wilson won out, and his administration was the first wave of the progressive movement. It would be followed by three more waves, each of which shared the following goals of the infiltration phase:

• 
Goal 1: Organize groups for control.
The collectivization of society began. Instead of focusing on individual rights and freedoms, progressives focused on organizing people into groups that set them apart. Sanger organized around “birth control” (i.e., eugenics), Wheeler organized around temperance, labor groups organized workers, and so on. This was the genesis of “community organizing,” and it has changed little from then to the days of Obama—herding people into groups, motivating them with fear.

• 
Goal 2: Infiltrate.
Slowly but deliberately, progressives inserted themselves into key American institutions, including the government, the labor movement, academia, the media, the military, and the courts. Progressives not only ran for high office, but they also made a point of inserting their operatives into a permanent government bureaucracy. They took control of the labor movement and of academia, which became a hotbed for progressivism at all levels. The leading “race-theory” eugenicists came from America's top universities such as Princeton and Johns Hopkins, the latter of which was designed specifically to bring the “German university” model to the United States. Progressives such as Dewey influenced the education of the youngest Americans.

• 
Goal 3: Weaken the social fabric.
For the collectivization of society to succeed, the natural, organic fibers of our social fabric—faith, tradition, family, heritage—needed to be ripped apart. Progressives systematically drew wedges between different segments of society by collectivizing and organizing them against one another. And all with an unceasing agenda of political correctness to revise history and remove all traces of faith from public life.

• 
Goal 4: Confuse the concept of right and wrong.
Sometimes it feels as if we're living in a moral house of mirrors—up means down, down means up, and everything is distorted. That is exactly how progressives want it. By preaching moral relativism and shaming us into thinking our traditions are wrong and outdated, by convincing us that our moral compass needs to “progress,” they can lead us ever closer to the final step of phase I . . .

• 
Goal 5: Bring society to a state of near crisis.
At some point, the confusion becomes too great, and those who could stand up to bring some sanity to the public sphere are successfully shamed into silence. The nation is brought to the edge of collapse so that progressives can step in and take power, all in a false-prophet effort to relieve people's fears and anxieties.

I believe this is where we are right now. This is the phase of turmoil that was accelerated by Obama and precedes the introduction of Chase's Political System X. Look at the characteristics of this phase, and see if anything sounds familiar:

• 
Allow chaos.
Chaos is an essential ingredient for the eventual rise of a new order. Progressives and authoritarians of all stripes understand this. It's why the Occupy movement was allowed to disrupt American cities for so long. It's why leftist commentators such as Al Sharpton encourage protest movements that lead to rioting, looting, and communities in flames. It's why violence breaks out at Trump rallies and the supposed leader offers to personally pay the perpetrators' legal fees. Chaos is becoming part of our society, and their hope is that very soon we will call out for order.

• 
Enforce negative stereotypes.
This is an ongoing part of progressives' efforts to divide our society. Efforts in the media, academia, and elsewhere—even in government—to shame certain segments of Americans are simply accepted. Concerned (peaceful) Americans in Tea Party groups are dismissed as radicals, while disenfranchised (and often violent) youths in Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter groups are held up as heroes. White people are automatically assumed to be racist, and the wealthy are assumed to be covetous and out to screw over everyone else. People of faith are seen to be hateful and closed-minded. Another stereotype frequently reinforced is that “white people are hate mongers” and racists, or faith-seekers are “backward” and closed-minded. We stop seeing each other as individual countrymen and simply as stereotypes.

• 
Isolate, destroy, and discourage “truth.”
Progressives have a narrative, and they've been sticking with it for more than a hundred years. If you attempt to question them, you must be stopped. That's why those who attempt to explain their strategy are mocked, ridiculed, and condemned—as I'm sure this book will be by those who'd rather its message never got out.

• 
Encourage reckless habits.
Progressives want us to become ever more reliant on the government. In order to make that happen, they degrade our ability to rely on ourselves, even when we want to. Even something as rational as preparing for a natural disaster is mocked. Meanwhile, Americans are running themselves into debt—just like their government—and we are told that destructive personal habits should be accepted, or even embraced, as some states have legalized marijuana. Once these individual reckless behaviors get out of control, where are we all supposed to turn for help? To the government, of course.

• 
Remain in shadows.
It is important in phase II that progressives stay out of the spotlight or at least that they define themselves as basically conventional liberals, offering no real damage to the country. They will have an important hand in controlling events, as they always have, but they are not yet ready to reveal themselves. The revolution is still in a gradualist phase at this point.

It is difficult to say with certainty how long we will remain in phase II. We saw that phase I took more than a century, although phase II is by definition more fast-moving and likely will not last quite as long. Its end point is phase III, the total shift of our free-market, republican system of government into Political System X.

We've discussed what X itself will look like in detail, but phase III also contains some additional steps to stop the chaos of phase II and solidify X as the system of the future:

• 
Grab control for “protection.”
This is the moment when progressives make their move in the open. When the reckless behavior that progressives have encouraged and the chaos that they have sown become overwhelming, they will arrive like the cavalry at the end of a western movie to save the day. But their help will come at a price: they will propose System X as the only way out of the mess.

• 
“Liquidate” those who oppose or allies who have served their purpose.
During phase II, we saw condemnation or marginalization of those who did not agree with the government line. Silencing of opponents is a hallmark of autocratic systems, from Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia (which Chase so admired) to fascist Italy (which Wilson's adviser Colonel Edward House so admired). Wilson himself threw political opponents into jail when they spoke out against World War I, and FDR imprisoned Americans in camps just for sharing heritage with the Japanese enemies in World War II. Remember these lessons of history the next time someone tells you it can't happen here.

• 
Activate shadow system.
This is the unveiling of the progressives who have been infiltrating government since the beginning. While it obviously won't be the same individuals, inculcating a progressive culture in national institutions has produced ideological descendants of the Sangers and Wilsons and Roosevelts and Chases of the world, people like Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton. Now, in their moment of triumph, they'll be able to show their true colors.

• 
Remain in crisis mode.
The crisis that began in phase II will never end, despite the promises made by the white knights coming in during phase III to rescue us. It can't. After all, if the crisis goes away, people might forget how much they need their government to take care of them.

This is a lot to take in. But it is our duty as active, thinking citizens of our republic to look at these issues with open eyes and clear minds. We shouldn't refuse to see something simply because we have been conditioned to believe it is not there.

Y
ou're sitting at your desk at work. You hear something, a loud thud. An explosion, maybe? Or more likely, just a car backfiring. It seemed too distant to be something to worry about. And then you hear the
tap-tap
, a rapid-fire succession of popping noises. A gun? Not likely. Not here. Not in the office.