By DEACON MIKE MANNO
One of the nice things about the Christmas holidays is that this paper skips an edition at the same time my radio station goes to all sacred music through January 1. That gives me a nice respite from column writing and program producing to just relax and contemplate what the Old Year has wrought and what the New Year might unveil.
As I watched the year-end reviews on television I was reminded of a column I wrote back in September of 2020. I looked it up and had an amazing, but not unexpected revelation. And the first thought that crossed my mind was: I warned you!!!
Here is, with some new additions, what I wrote back then:
I started with the old maxim of “divide and conquer” which had been used throughout history to achieve military and political victory over one’s opponents. A variant of that was used in our political system but it was toned down somewhat by an overwhelming sense of national unity.
Unfortunately, I wrote then, that over time we have lost the sense of an overarching unity that transcends all, with each side playing to its own base of niche groups, railing against the other side’s groups in order to gain power.
With that in mind, let’s go back to 1966 when two members of the Democratic Socialists of America, Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and his wife, Frances Fox Piven, articulated a strategy which sought to quicken the fall of capitalism by overloading the government with a flood of impossible demands which would push society into crisis and economic collapse.
Much of their theory was based on the work of socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky. Cloward and Piven started with welfare reform. They argued that the welfare system manipulated and weakened the poor who could only advance when “the rest of society is afraid of them.” Yet in their view, the welfare program provided a safety net which calmed anxieties and placated the poor.
Thus Cloward and Piven argued that activists should work to sabotage the welfare system by forcing it to collapse which would spark a poor people’s rebellion to which the government must respond. They suggested endorsing goals, such as a guaranteed living wage and the redistribution of wealth.
Their strategy was outlined at the 1966 Socialists Scholars Conference. The following year the National Welfare Rights Organization was founded which began to use the tactics Cloward and Piven had suggested, in which the poor and minorities were urged to seek all the benefits allowable under law. The idea was to overwhelm the system using such tactics as relaxing welfare requirements, like the elimination of work or job requirements, which would lead to economic collapse.
As I wrote in 2020: Organizers used sit-ins, mass demonstrations, school boycotts, picket lines, and riotous behaviors, to gain legislative and court victories. Despite good economic times, welfare rolls jumped over 200 percent; in New York City alone for every two working persons, there was now one on welfare. Although the guaranteed living wage was not achieved, the tens of billions of dollars in welfare entitlements came close to sinking the economy, just as Cloward and Piven had predicted, and was partly responsible for the bankruptcy of New York City in 1975.
After the attempt to scuttle the economy by trying to overload the welfare system, the pair moved to other areas, one of which was the voting system. They disapproved of the electoral system for the same reason they complained about the welfare system: It placated the marginalized, giving them the idea that their vote gave them a stake in the government which dissipated their anger.
To that end the team concentrated on transforming the Democratic Party. In 1982 they presented their plan in the left-wing publication, Social Policy, which entailed the same roadmap they used to try to overwhelm the welfare system: flood the system with new voters to provoke a political backlash.
As I wrote back then: “The backlash would force officials into using unfamiliar and cumbersome registration procedures, purging non-voters from the rolls, and other voter suppression devices that would create an anti-backlash against the establishment over voting rights. The result led to the transformed Democratic Party, now allied with the poor in their new ‘class struggle.’ Groups like ACORN led on these issues demanding such things as the 1993 Motor-Voter law which made it easier to register to vote but harder to determine the validity of the new registrations.”
The journalist and writer John Fund wrote in his book Stealing Elections: “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship. States had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election officials. Finally, states were limited in pruning ‘deadwood’ — people who had died, moved, or been convicted of crimes – from their rolls.”
Fund reported that Motor-Voter did swamp the voter rolls with millions of invalid registrations filed on behalf of sometimes dead or nonexistent persons, setting the stage for unprecedented levels of voter fraud and voter disenfranchisement claims.
As I wrote then, Fund reported that in 2010 then-Cong. Barney Frank (D., Mass) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) were preparing legislation whereby any person whose name was on any federal list would be automatically registered to vote without any identity verification at polling stations. The intent was to overwhelm the voting rolls to collapse the system as was tried with the welfare system. It was all an outgrowth of their plans to destabilize the election system causing chaos to the benefit of the socialists.
Of course, this necessitated help from friends embedded in the government bureaucracies to “assist” in the administration of the new socialist economic programs which were now being provided by the taxpayers.
Libertarian economist Wayne Allyn Root wrote in 2010: “Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven….They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they’re alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival…and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.”
He also suggested that if you add healthcare (Obamacare) with statehood for the District of Columbia as well as Puerto Rico, legalization of the approximately 12 million illegal immigrants then in the country, and raising taxes you’ll get the “perfect Marxist scheme.”
That is what I wrote back in 2020, before the disastrous response to the COVID pandemic which forced school, business, and even some church closings and well before the debacle of the “COVID requires rules change” election. And yet what happened immediately after the election was the unofficial opening of the Southern Border and the swamping of our Homeland Security system by a flood of incoming immigrants who were allowed to boarder-jump all the while our border protectors were reduced to administrative duties, baby sitting, and scattering the new arrivals across the nation by the dark of night.
And we still hear of plans to give amnesty (read that citizenship and voting rights) to all those who entered the country illegally, as well as statehood for DC, and we already have authorized 87,000 new IRS agents to suck up any lose change the bumpkins in the cheap seats have left.
Things are progressing nicely for those wishing to overload and override the systems of government. Biden and his cronies know exactly what they are doing: following the Marxist playbook of Cloward and Piven. It’s working nicely for those who wish to — not to coin a phrase — “fundamentally change America.”
And we wonder why our traditional civic values, beliefs, and even religious institutions are under attack. It’s all part of the plan.
Fentanyl anyone?
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Weekend on Faith On Trial at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/)
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