From American Greatness. My father was a liberal Democrat. He worshiped FDR and didn’t care much for the GOP. His parents were staunch Republicans, and the political discussions I remember from the 1950s were always entertaining—if not a bit confusing—to this eight-year-old. Importantly, while my dad was a liberal, he was a virulent anti-Communist, and saw them as just as evil as the Nazis he went to war to eradicate.

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The reasons my father hated the Communists are neatly spelled out in The Naked Communist, a book written in 1958 by political theorist W. Cleon Skousen, who eerily predicted our current state of affairs. In a section titled “Current Communist Goals,” he elucidates the plan in 45 steps, explaining that “many loyal Americans are working for these same objectives because they are not aware that these objectives are designed to destroy us.”

Skousen is especially insightful on the cultural and educational strife we are now experiencing. For example, in Step 20, he writes, “Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.”. . . .
In Step 30, Skousen foresaw the current mania to deny the greatness of George Washington and other iconic Americans who don’t toe the utopian party line. “Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the ‘common man.’”

Skousen is especially on-target when he presaged the Marxist infiltration into the education sector. Step 17 asserts: “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.”

. . . The National Education Association playbook was adapted directly from Marxist community organizer Saul Alinsky, who was hired by the union as a trainer in the 1960s. John Lloyd, an NEA insider at the time, explained that to understand the union, learning about Alinsky is a must. Reading Rules for Radicals, will help one “understand NEA more profoundly than reading anything else,” he said, because the organization was modeled on Alinsky’s precepts, which the union used to train its staff. . . .

Step 28: “Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of ‘separation of church and state.’”

Prayer in school was banned a few years after Skousen predicted its demise. . . .

Step 38: “Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.”

Police now are out of favor. Typical is the Los Angeles Unified School District which cut 133 or about 40 percent of its school cops in favor of kinder and gentler “climate coaches” in 2021. It was also decided that police would no longer patrol campuses, and would only be called upon to respond in-person during emergencies. “Restorative justice” and other similar non-consequences for willful defiance and worse have become the norm. As a result, discipline suffers and a few disruptors can make life miserable for behaving students and teachers alike. It turns teachers and counselors into therapists, emphasizes “making the victim and offender whole,” and involves “an open discussion of feelings.”

Step 40: “Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce” and Step 41: “Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks, and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents” are obviously related.

Clearly, Skousen hits the bullseye here. The area of sex and gender is especially vexing. While God has been banned, schools see fit to tell your boy he may be a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and can change his school identity and hide it from the parents.

On the national level, the Biden Administration is pushing to redefine “sex” in the Title IX rules to include “gender identity.” In reality, the change would threaten one of the basic principles of American society: that parents, not the state, are the primary caretakers for children. With the proposed change, the country is poised to compel school districts to treat students as the opposite sex, without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Even without federal help, many states are pursuing a similar anti-family path on their own.. . .

A school in Wisconsin recently hung up a poster which proclaimed, “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.” . . . .

The long Marxist march through the institutions is continuing at breakneck speed.

How are you praying about the advance of communist ideas in our nation?

(Excerpt from American Greatness. Photo Credit: Canva Pro.)