The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 26, 2021, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Franklin, Tennessee.

I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin. 

I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.

Look at just three things we have lost. 

One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.

Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.

And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government. 

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Though I’m a New Zealander, I know America and its people well. I’ve traveled to every state in the Lower 48 and have addressed more than 500 audiences across this amazing nation. My message has always been the same: The United States is heading toward a brutally tyrannical socialist revolution—and if America goes down, every free country follows.

Well, now it’s here, people, unfolding before our very eyes.

So, what can be done? Can the Republic be saved? Honestly, I don’t know.

However, I can suggest some steps that would at least give this country a fighting chance.

1. Face Reality

Millions of Americans are still in complete denial. Many think the military is secretly in control—that it’s only a matter of time until justice is done and President Donald Trump is restored. There’s a “secret plan”—just “have faith.” The truth is that Trump was outmaneuvered by an alliance of communists, globalists, and even traitors in his own party. The “deep state” is now almost fully in control.

Trump isn’t coming back into office any time before 2024—if we still have meaningful elections by then.

To make sure they can never be voted out of office, the Democrats plan to enfranchise 22 million illegal immigrants, abolish the Electoral College, gain at least four more far-left senators through Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood, and flood the country with tens of millions more refugees and illegal immigrants. They also plan to nationally introduce voting “reforms,” i.e., mass mail-in balloting, abolition of ID requirements, etc., that will guarantee eternal Democratic Party control.

If the Democrats can abolish the Senate filibuster and place at least four more leftist “justices” on the Supreme Court, there’ll be virtually no way to stop any of this if we rely on traditional political methods.

We’re undergoing a Marxist-Leninist revolution driven by China—right now, in real time.

The military can’t save us, nor can Trump. On the contrary, it’s up to patriots to protect Trump and the Armed Services from unrelenting Democrat/communist attacks.

When enough Americans face the unpleasant truth, then, and only then, can we talk about hope.

2. Stop All Violent Rhetoric

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More than 120 retired military flag officers with Flag Officers 4 America published an open letter Monday warning that the United States is in “deep peril” and under “tremendous assault” by supporters of socialism and Marxism, urging Americans to get involved in “a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding.”

“Under a Democrat Congress and the Current Administration, our Country has taken a hard left turn toward Socialism and a Marxist form of tyrannical government which must be countered now by electing congressional and presidential candidates who will always act to defend our Constitutional Republic. The survival of our Nation and its cherished freedoms, liberty, and historic values are at stake,” the letter states.

“We urge all citizens to get involved now at the local, state and/or national level to elect political representatives who will act to Save America, our Constitutional Republic, and hold those currently in office accountable,” it continued. “The “will of the people” must be heard and followed.”

In the letter, the retired generals and admirals slammed the 2020 election process, citing “election irregularities.” The group also argued that Democrats’ bills H.R. 1 and S. 1, designed to federalize voting standards, would “destroy election fairness” and “[end] our Representative Republic.”

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By   Christopher F. Rufo
Founder and Director, Battlefront

Christopher F. Rufo is founder and director of Battlefront, a public policy research center. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and a former Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. As executive director at the Documentary Foundation, he has directed four films for PBS, including most recently America Lost, which explores life in Youngstown, Ohio, Memphis, Tennessee, and Stockton, California. He is also a contributing editor of City Journal, where he covers topics including critical race theory, homelessness, addiction, and crime.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on March 30, 2021.

Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it. It’s time for this to change. We need to know what it is so we can know how to fight it.

In explaining critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political program on the theory of class conflict. Marx believed that the primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance, according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.

During the 20th century, a number of regimes underwent Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere racked up a body count of nearly 100 million of their own people. They are remembered for their gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice, Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.

By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never occur in Western Europe or the United States, where there were large middle classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and good citizenship.

But rather than abandon their Leftist political project, Marxist scholars in the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and ethnic categories.

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