The Origins of America’s Dangerous Turn Left

Many leading personalities in American politics, media and academia have become dangerously radical. They promote policies that are weakening the nation economically, socially, morally, militarily and geopolitically.

How did the radical left gain such control of America? The problem is far deeper, and has been going on much longer, than most people realize.

During the Cold War, there was a lot of fear within America about the spread of communism. Today, most Americans no longer consider it a threat of any concern.

But it is of grave concern. Few people realize it, but many mainstream political views in America today are identical to—and trace directly back to—the ideals and beliefs of communism or Marxism.

Bernie Sanders, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and gained significant popular support, claims to be a socialist. The alignment between socialism and communism is significant. Many Communists even call themselves socialists. The fact that Mr. Sanders’s views have so much support reveals how dangerously ignorant the American people are.

What do you know about communism? A growing number of Americans support the government taking over health care and other major segments of the national economy. They fail to understand the dangers that accompany a Communist system.

Understanding Communism

Socialism and communism are alike in fundamental ways. Both say the centralized government—or “the public”—should own and control production, rather than individual business owners. Both call for centralized planning and control, which make for powerful governments that are highly susceptible to corruption. Socialism is considered the transition stage from capitalism to communism; in some cases, it is a less radical version that might eventually “mature” into communism.

In the early years of the Cold War, educator and theologian Herbert W. Armstrong wrote quite a lot about communism. We need to understand why he was so deeply concerned.

Mr. Armstrong wrote in the February 1962 issue of the Plain Truth newsmagazine: “[T]he ‘Communist Party’ is merely a trick term to pull the wool over our eyes and deceive us—a means of getting a fifth column into our midst—of getting the enemy’s government into our very midst—leading us to accept it as a part of our government. Its only object is to destroy our government.”

This is a basic truth. The Communist movement in America has only one object: to destroy America’s government! A number of nations have outlawed communism, yet America foolishly allows it as a political party.

Although the Communist Party usa currently has little power as an official political entity, the broader Communist movement has significant influence in many aspects of American politics and society. In an article about “the new communism,” Alan Johnson, former professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University, wrote: “A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of left-wing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power” (World Affairs, May-June 2012). That worldview is communism. And it is still bent on subverting and toppling the established order.

Modern proponents of communism downplay its subversive goals. But subversion is its very foundation! The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is considered the “sacred text” of communism. It stresses the need for a total overthrow of existing governments. The Manifesto concludes with some words that may sound eerily familiar to modern news watchers: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

The reason this may sound familiar is that students at the University of Missouri chanted a paraphrase of the line about chains in November 2015 as they protested, forced the resignation of the university president, and cried out for the whole system to be overthrown. Constitutional law attorney David French said these students are “revolutionaries, and the revolution they seek is nothing less than the overthrow of our constitutional republic, beginning with our universities” (National Review, Nov. 9, 2015; emphasis mine throughout).

You do not have to look hard to find evidence of communism’s influence in America today!

The New Left was a powerful political movement that swept through the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. Agitators and educators worked to bring about changes in homosexual rights, abortion, gender roles, drugs and other issues. The movement was closely tied to the “hippie” movement, and it achieved many of its lawless goals. The New Left was almost identical to the Communist Party! The champions of the movement had stunning success in working their way into key positions in today’s Democratic Party! Look at the radical left today. Is it any different from communism?

“With Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party having collapsed, Hawaii’s Reds changed their tactics. They went underground and concentrated instead on infiltrating the Democratic Party,” Paul Kengor wrote in the October 2012 American Spectator. “For America’s Reds, it was the start of a long march to operate within the Democratic Party, transforming it from the party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy to the party of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.” When Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the house in 2007, I was shocked. She had said the most obscene things I had ever heard a politician say. I expressed then that this was a disaster for the Democratic Party and for the nation.

Regarding the Communist goal to overthrow the government, Mr. Armstrong went on to write: “Of course, if it could do this peaceably at the polls, it would—but it knows it can’t …” (op cit). That was true at that time—but in recent years, these radicals have been able to win at the polls. This shows how much America has degenerated!

The radical left has gained control of the government and much of the country. What is the left’s end goal? Mr. Armstrong continued, “[I]f it could do it peaceably at the polls, it would—but it knows it can’t, so it does stand for the violent overthrow of the United States government” (emphasis his). This is what it is all about. It has never been merely a political party—it is a movement to destroy the government of America. And it has succeeded on an amazingly high level!

A Foothold in Education

In the 1960s and ’70s, America had many problems with rioting and violence on college campuses. Educators would ask who was in charge, and in almost every case, there was nobody in charge except the people who were rioting.

Soon, the New Left began to infiltrate these institutions and gain control. It was in the educational system that the left got its foothold into the nation: first in colleges, then high schools and even elementary schools. It is from the educational system that a nation gets its leadership. Where did the ideas of America’s leaders today come from? From our educational institutions.

Consider this: The Soviet Union pushed harder to establish communism than perhaps any government in history. Much of that push happened not within its own borders, but inside America! In 1970, kgb agent Yuri Bezmenov defected from the Soviet Union and escaped to Canada. He went to great lengths to warn Americans about the stealth attack the Soviets were waging against them.

Bezmenov said, “[O]nly about 15 percent of [the Soviet Union’s] time, money and manpower is spent on espionage as such.” The remaining 85 percent, he said, “is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or ‘active measures’ ….” Most of this happened in American schools! Some of the main methods were infiltrating universities with radical leftists, establishing Communist-staffed newspapers, and holding international seminars with Soviet participation.

According to a former staff director of a Senate investigations subcommittee, in the years between 1935 and 1953, the Communist Party usa “enlisted the support of at least 3,500 professors” (J. B. Matthews, American Mercury, May 1953).

Documents from the Soviet archives revealed that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party usa received $2 million to $3 million each year from the Kremlin. This funding was to further the party’s subversive activities.

Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956 about the Communists “perverting our morals, sabotaging our educational system, wrecking our social structure, destroying our spiritual and religious life, weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence! All this clearly disguised as a harmless political party! Communism is a worldwide psychological warfare!”

Communists first corrupt, pollute and agitate from within. But their final phase is a violent overthrow of the government. They aim to destroy the system, because they can’t build another one until that happens.

The Communist attack from within America is far more significant than you may realize. We are staring it in the face today.

The Real Watergate Scandal

In 1974, U.S. President Richard Nixon resigned from office over the Watergate scandal. It was discovered that the Nixon administration had broken into the Democratic National Committee headquarters and tried to cover it up. Many Americans these days know little about what happened at Watergate. To them, it is a scandal that brought down a corrupt president. But there is much more to the story.

President Nixon was a staunch opponent of communism, and the left hated him for it. At the time of Watergate, Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, said: “The American press get the pleasure in successfully crucifying Nixon, but the last laugh could be on them. See how they like it when the Commies take over the West.” He was only one of many people who thought that way.

What happened at that time has a lot to do with what we see today.

I remember hearing educator Dr. Herman Hoeh making this point in 1980. He said that President Nixon actually had come to recognize a conspiracy to work Communists into the New Left in America, and that he broke it up. “And for that,” Hoeh said, “he was driven out of the presidency because a part of his plan involved preventing the far left from capturing the Democratic Party. And hence, Watergate. That’s all a part of the story that most people don’t realize. Watergate was not an attempt to see who was at some party of the Democratic headquarters; it was far more serious.”

What happens if the far left gets control of the Democratic Party? Well, if it is elected, then it gets control of the government, the nation and everything that matters.

More evidence emerged recently backing up this view of what actually happened in the Watergate scandal. Geoff Shepard documented it in his book The Real Watergate Scandal, published in 2015.

Shepard served as deputy defense counsel for the Nixon administration during the Watergate hearings. “It was the first and, hopefully, the only presidential resignation in our nation’s history,” Shepard wrote in the Washington Times. “But it seared my soul, and I’ve spent many intervening years trying to understand how everything went so wrong” (Aug. 10, 2015).

“Four decades later, I’ve begun to appreciate what the real tragedy was. In one of the ultimate ironies of political history, it appears that the smoking-gun tape [an audio tape in which Nixon apparently sought to limit the fbi’s investigation, and for which he was prosecuted for obstruction of justice] has been totally misunderstood, that the president need not have resigned, and that he was actually driven from office—and his senior aides imprisoned—through highly improper actions of judges and Watergate prosecutors” (ibid).

“John Dean, President Nixon’s principal accuser, has recently acknowledged that the president and his defense team were totally mistaken about the tape and its significance,” Shepard writes in his book. “If we had known the context in which that conversation had taken place, the president would not have had to resign, and in Dean’s own words, ‘could have lived to fight another day.’”

“Documents I’ve recently uncovered in the National Archives tell a tale of secret meetings, secret memos and secret collusion that will shock many Americans and that constitute flagrant violations of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights,” Shepard wrote (Washington Times, op cit). The people who were supposed to be protecting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were trampling all over it behind closed doors. This was supposedly in pursuit of “justice” for a lawless president!

Alger Hiss

“Shepard said the left’s disdain for Nixon began when he was a congressman in the 1940s and brought down Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who was regarded as a leftist hero” (Townhall​.com, Aug. 9, 2015). Why would a Soviet spy be a leftist hero?

Alger Hiss was educated at Harvard Law School. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and was even in the delegation at the Yalta Conference where Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin divided up Europe. Through Hiss, the Communists were actually penetrating the Truman administration; he was in high places in the State Department.

Apparently the left likes Soviet spies, because when Richard Nixon brought Hiss down, he made himself a target. Shepard told Townhall, “And what happened in Watergate, if you look at it in retrospect, the eastern liberal elites got control of the special prosecutor’s office, and they had a power to prosecute. They criminalized prosecution. They staffed the place with all their friends” (ibid). He proves this in his book.

“Nixon came to national prominence as a result of this investigation,” Shepard writes in his book, “and Hiss was convicted of perjury in 1950.” They had reached the statute of limitations and couldn’t really convict him of much, but they did convict him. “The liberal eastern establishment, particularly its many Harvard-educated members, never forgave Nixon for his leadership in bringing down one of their own.”

Soviet spy Alger Hiss was “one of their own.” He came right out of Harvard, America’s top university! These highly educated people had that spirit even then, and they wanted to get control of the government.

Most of these people hate the Constitution, the supreme law of the land! They are lawless! They can’t stand to be constrained by the Constitution and law.

The lawbreaking in the Watergate scandal was nothing compared to the lawbreaking these people did behind the scenes. They violated the Constitution time after time because they have no respect for it. They have such towering respect for their own intellect that they think they know more than the Founding Fathers! This has led the U.S. into catastrophic problems.

We must keep in mind that they have a plan: Their sole purpose is to destroy the government of the land. They seek to destroy the whole American system and replace it with another, which is really communism and tyranny. They want all of America looking to one man—like Russia looked to Stalin!

Lawless Backroom Deals

“John Sirica is a disgrace to the federal judiciary,” Shepard told Townhall (op cit). Sirica was the presiding judge over the Watergate trial. He colluded with prosecutors behind closed doors, and they worked everything out together. Judges and lawyers are supposed to remain separate, but Sirica worked with the prosecutors to bring Nixon down.

“Watergate prosecutors took the government files with them,” Shepard explained. “These are government documents, and they should have stayed at National Archives and then subject to review with researchers like me. But three of the key prosecutors took their files” (ibid). Why did they take the files? Because they wanted to hide what they were doing. They didn’t want the public to know that they were unjustly destroying a president and tearing down a government!

Though he had no real idea of the scope of these activities, Richard Nixon did see through a lot of what these people were doing. He had stopped them—and they hated him for that. They were determined to take him down.

“Nixon was done in by officers of the court,” Shepard writes in his book, “the very people sworn to uphold the law and the Constitution—federal judges and federal prosecutors who met in secret and reached backroom deals on how best to take him down and secure conviction of his senior aides. That is the real Watergate scandal ….”

Yet again we see lawlessness that is bringing down America! What will you have when the rule of law is destroyed? You will have nightmares like Stalin. What an example he set! Read some of Stalin’s history. He was a madman who imprisoned, exiled and executed millions of his own people! He purged nearly all the top leadership of his army because he was so paranoid about people trying to destroy him.

Not Just a Political Party

“Actually, the Communist Party is not a mere political party, in the sense Americans think of the term,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “It is a ruthless, totalitarian dictatorship. It is run with absolute power by a few men at the top—all of whom are completely subservient to one man who is dictator-absolute! This one-man dictatorship is supposed to be necessary because there may be different interpretations of the Marxist philosophy. Therefore, to prevent division, they must have a supreme interpreter” (Plain Truth, op cit). When you give one man that kind of authority and power, it will always bring about a tyranny!

“It is not part of any government. It is a government—a world government, which has set up, and therefore rules the Soviet government in Russia. It is supreme over the Soviet government! Instead of being another political party as part of the party system of American government, it is a foreign government whose sole purpose is to destroy and overthrow the government of the United States and set up a foreign Communist government here instead …” (ibid).

We must see that this trend will play out until the final phase: the violent overthrow of the system.

Communist Mentors

There is an additional dimension to this crisis in America: an Antiochus type who was at the pinnacle of power, acting like something he is not.

Barack Obama was influenced as a youth by Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying Communist Party member. “Davis’s unflagging support of Stalin’s Soviet Union is apparent in a poem he wrote, lovingly titled ‘To the Red Army,’” Paul Kengor wrote (0p cit). The poem reads, “Smash on victory-eating Red warriors! Drive on, oh mighty people’s juggernaut! … Show the marveling multitudes, Americans, British, all your allied brothers, How strong you are, How great you are, How your young tree of new unity, Planted 25 years ago, Bears today the golden fruit of victory!”

Anyone who publicly speaks of this crucial aspect of the former president’s personal history is immediately branded a racist. But this is the truth!

In the mind of Frank Marshall Davis, the greatest threat to the world wasn’t the Soviet menace, but “Anglo-American imperialist domination.”

In his posthumously published memoir Livin’ the Blues, Davis admitted to working with several radical left-wing groups in Chicago between 1935 and 1948. “I worked with all kinds of groups,” he wrote. “I made no distinction between those labeled Communist, socialist or merely liberal. My sole criterion was this: ‘Are you with me in my determination to wipe out white supremacy?’”

Davis harbored a deep hatred for Winston Churchill. “[T]he only people Churchill gives a rap about are the white people of the British Empire,” Davis said, adding that the prime minister sought help from the U.S. to pummel “all other countries into submission.” That is a monstrous lie! Churchill was probably the greatest world leader of the 20th century, and the fruits prove it. But after Mr. Obama took office, he got rid of the bust of Winston Churchill in the White House, on loan from Britain. This was a major insult to America’s British allies. Apparently the president really believed Davis’s teaching against Churchill.

It was Mr. Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who introduced him to Davis, seeking in “Davis the father figure and role model that Obama lacked at home” (ibid). So he needed a father figure. He also had one in Jeremiah Wright.

Kengor wrote, “In 1995, an aspiring politician named Barack Obama published an autobiography called Dreams From My Father. There, Obama acknowledged the people who influenced him throughout his life. Among the most prominent influences was the figure that Obama gingerly acknowledged only as ‘Frank’”—referring to Frank Marshall Davis, his mentor (TheBlaze, Oct. 3, 2012).

Mr. Obama is not the person most people think he is. He has a manufactured persona that he wants you to see.

It is stunning how much and how often the government of this land is exposed for being deceitful. Everything revolves around deceit. Americans have practically come to accept this as a fact of politics today—but it is deeply disturbing and will have dangerous consequences!

Americans today are not living in the nation of our Founding Fathers, or even of our own fathers. The ideological roots of the Obama administration were more radical than the public was led to believe, and it is certain that the devil used this fact to his advantage.

The radical left and its Marxist ideas have gained control of the Democratic Party. Here is a quote from “How Black Lives Matter Is Bringing Back Traditional Marxism,” by Thurston Powers: “It isn’t surprising that Black Lives Matter [blm] is a Communist organization—but the type of communism they subscribe to is. They are conservative Communists attempting to fold the progressive movement back into traditional Marxism. …

“The policy platform proposed by blm in August did nothing to hide this traditionalism. Its calls for collective ownership of resources, banks and businesses, a highly progressive income tax, a guaranteed minimum income, and government jobs are lifted straight from the pages of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto” (Federalist.com, Sept. 28, 2016).

During the 2016 presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave their full support to the Black Lives Matter organization. Mr. Obama and his administration even invited its leaders to the White House on several occasions.

The sad truth is that humanity will have to endure a time of intense suffering due to its own hardheadedness. But the wonderful truth is that this time of suffering immediately precedes the greatest event in history.

This world’s systems of government and economics—not just communism but even democracy and capitalism—will never bring about good governance, prosperity and equality. However, at the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, this world will experience a form of government that will establish these things—a system that only He can implement!

Continue Reading: Chapter 4: The Deadly Deal With Cuba