Waay back in 1970 a Soviet defector warned us about what's happening today

I wrote the piece below in 2015.  Current events prompted me to re-post it.

Yuri Bezmenov was the son of a high-ranking Soviet army officer.  He attended elite schools in Moscow and later worked as a propagandist for the KGB.  Eventually he became disillusioned with communism and in 1970 he defected to Canada.  He spent the rest of his life explaining that the Soviet strategic plan for defeating the U.S. was not on the "kinetic" battlefield but by getting our "elites" to disparage and discredit virtually everything about our principles and way of life.

If they succeeded, there would be no need for war, as the U.S. would no longer have the will and means to oppose communism. 

Bezmenov tried tried to warn us.  No one wanted to listen.

Stage One: Demoralization – Rejection of any notion of American exceptionalism, rejection of fundamental founding principles, deprecation of religion (portraying believers, especially Christians, as unenlightened, "uncool"), leading to a loss of any semblance of national identity.  (Remember "I'm going to fundamentally change America"?  Pressure by elites on peers and academics to convince them that the values set forth by the Founders were inherently flawed, racist, sexist, etc.  Get the "elites" to re-write our history, to make Americans--especially students--question the legitimacy of all American achievements--and thus to believe our founding principles aren't worth defending.

Stage Two: Destabilization – Using economic, financial, and national security crises to get Americans to accept government rules they normally wouldn't have tolerated.  Inciting racial conflict.  Push for higher government benefits for victim groups that must eventually bankrupt the government (Cloward-Piven).  Make unemployment and welfare benefits as attractive as jobs to many people.  Use crises to elect politicians who will promise more "free" benefits ("Hope and change").  Push the idea that jobs are--and should be--created not by private enterprise but by government.  Push the idea that economic recovery and public safety demand passage of laws that exceed all previous government authority (the trillion-dollar "Stimulus" bill, "cash for clunkers," bailout of AIG, more regulations on industry, Obamacare, president violating U.S. immigration laws by executive order, using the IRS to punish conservative groups, etc).

Stage Three: Normalization – A period in which people are so overwhelmed by the destabilization that they begin to accept a ‘new normal’.  Media elites push stories to persuade people to accept losses of freedoms and abandonment of our founding principles.  Thus when a Democrat U.S. senator proposes jailing anyone who argues that global warming isn't caused by humans via CO2 emissions, and no one bats an eye.  Yale students can sign a petition calling for eliminating the First Amendment and no one in the Mainstream Media is critical.  Unprecedented, intrusive government control is gradually accepted as “just the way things are.”

Next up: – Federal registration of all guns;  federal regulation of the internet (already proposed);  Democrat-appointed FCC commissioners creating a "rule" requiring that anyone stating a "political opinion" on the internet must first obtain a license from the FCC;  confiscation of handguns in cities deemed to be "emergency areas" due to a high rate of shootings.  Of course this will be billed as merely a temporary measure and anyone who opposes it will be called a racist, since most of the victims will be black.  Next:  Making it a crime to collect rainwater that falls on your own land (the state of Oregon already fined a family for this "crime"!).  Making it a crime to plant certain legal crops without government permission (a principle upheld by the U.S. supreme court way back in 1946!).  Making it a crime to plant a vegetable garden in your own front yard.  (That too has already happened.)

History provides ample warning signs to anyone who wishes to see.  Current events are similarly full of warning signs. Socialism has never worked anywhere it’s been tried, and an all-powerful, untouchable government is a huge danger. Yet leftist "elites" and low-info voters are eager to do anything to hasten the end of freedom, capitalism and free markets.

If it wasn't so tragic it would be a matter of great amusement to watch both groups--"elites" and anarchist thugs--systematically destroying the greatest system for human achievement ever known.

I wrote the above in 2015, five years before the Chinese virus started the Democrat party's push for total control.   Five years ago some of it seemed over-the-top, un-possible.  But in the past year...