by Patrice Johnson
During a recent conversation with Cathy, a Michigan Fair Elections supporter, I was embarrassed to admit I hadn’t heard of attorney Jeff Childers. She sent me his “great big end-of-the-year roundup essay,” and I am pleased to republish select portions that relate to election integrity here.
The power of the individual rings through, as do the successes and challenges of the past year. I took the liberty of bolding some portions, and where I felt compelled to add my two cents, I’ve bracketed them.
May you enjoy the read, and may 2023 be healthy, happy and productive for you and your loved ones.
CHAPTER ONE. THE ROAD BEHIND US
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Whitaker Chambers (1902-1964) the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Chambers had died twenty years earlier after testifying in Congress against State Department official and treasonous Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who’d drafted the United Nations Charter allegedly on the United States’ behalf at Yalta.
Until 1938, Chambers ran a U.S.-based spy ring for the Soviet communists. He was born in the U.S. right after the turn of the century, grew up poor in an atheist household, and was attracted by communism. But he defected in 1938, having grown increasingly uncomfortable with Stalin’s internal purges and having found God.
For ten years after Chambers fled into hiding, he tried unsuccessfully to interest the FBI in his ring of traitorous, highly placed government and state department officials that he’d been supervising and who were working to secretly undermine the United States. About the time he’d given up, the House Un-American Activities Committee reached out, and the rest, as they say, was history.
In 1952, Chambers published his autobiography, ‘Witness,’ which became one of the most influential American anti-communist and conservative books in history. I’m going to quote a few parts from the introduction, in which Chambers — fully expecting to be assassinated — addressed his children to explain why he went public and testified about what the Russians were up to.
According to Chambers, communism poses an existential crisis to Mankind and begins with the belief that science can save humans from the very problems that were created by the rise of science:In part, the crisis results from the impact of science and technology upon mankind which, neither socially nor morally, has caught up with the problems posed by that impact. In part, it is caused by men’s efforts to solve those problems.
Chambers asked how communism could infect the minds of very smart folks who should know better, but instead, they become willfully blinded to the reprehensible ideology’s evils. Again, speaking to his children:
I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. You will ask: Why, then, do men become Communists? How did it happen that you, our gentle and loved father, were once a Communist? Were you simply stupid?
No, I was not stupid.
Were you morally depraved?
No, I was not morally depraved. Indeed, educated men become Communists chiefly for moral reasons.
Did you not know that the crimes and horrors of Communism are inherent in Communism?
Yes, I knew that fact.
Then why did you become a Communist?
It would help more to ask: How did it happen that this movement, once a mere muttering of political outcasts, became this immense force that now contests the mastery of mankind? Even when all the chances and mistakes of history are allowed for, the answer must be: Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind. You will not find out what it is by calling Communism names. That will not help much to explain why Communism whose horrors, on a scale unparalleled in history, are now public knowledge, still recruits its thousands and holds its millions—among them, some of the best minds alive.Chambers’ explained with a simple statement from Karl Marx:
“Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world.”
Communists, Chambers wrote, are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weaknesses of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction: It is necessary to change the world.
Chambers begins the first chapter describing WHY he made his fateful decision to leave the Communist Party and turn on his former allies. This paragraph always profoundly affected me:I wanted my wife to realize clearly one long-term penalty, for herself and for the children, of the step I was taking. I said: “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” I meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed or that has happened to me since has made me think that I was wrong about that forecast.
Chambers had intimate knowledge of how far the Communists had penetrated the U.S. government. He knew full well the odds were stacked against him, against us all; an enormous, terrifying, heaping mountain of bad odds.
“We are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” Chambers wrote when he defected in 1938 and again in 1952—almost 15 years later.
In other words, the free countries were losing the world. In fact, in 1980, if you’d painted all the communist countries on a classroom globe red, that globe would’ve been 75% crimson.
We were in the final inning with minutes to play, down by six, with two strikes. It looked bad.
But still, against all odds, in just eight years, Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. It bought us 40 years of peace. There we were, stumbling blindly along the brittle precipice of losing it all, up to our eyelashes in communist spies, probably including in several White Houses, when in the blink of an eye, against all odds, we saved the entire world.
Just like that.
Unfortunately, Reagan only beat the Soviet Union. He didn’t defeat communism. He didn’t — couldn’t — crush the insane delusion that Man can replace God with Science. Neither did Reagan root out the networks of treacherous communist termites secretly embedded in nearly every government on Earth.
That’s what happened. Now allow me to spin the dial toward speculation about our present circumstances and what comes next, even allowing that history is never settled or free from controversy. Figuring out what’s happening in the present can be perilously tricky, if not impossible. The future? Well, that’s just guesswork.
But it seems fair to imagine that, after the Berlin Wall came down, world communists, having just been rubbing their bloodstained hands in glee at the thought of imminent global domination, stood stunned, dumbfounded, and astonished, having watched the whole thing ripped from their grasp at the very last second by some toxically-masculine cowboy.
Baffled, they wondered, “What just happened?”
They’d already learned one lesson with Stalin; don’t put any more narcissistic dictators in charge of the movement. But after Reagan, I imagine the communist élites recognized the risk of being too obvious, too public. The Soviet Union was a target that could be, and was, destroyed. It was a basket with too many eggs in it.
It started too soon. They learned you don’t want to go communist in one place until you’re ready to go all-in everywhere, all at once.
They also learned the grave danger of allowing a populist, anti-communist president like Reagan (or Trump) to have a full eight years. But that’s a different story.
At the time the Soviet Union collapsed, our and every other government in the world was packed with treacherous communist termites waiting for their orders.
In other words, outside the Soviet Union, the communist spy network remained solidly in place in the newspapers, TV stations, courthouses, and government offices. Nobody went after them.
Nobody fumigated the communists. Nobody cleaned house.
I wonder how many seconds it took for the top soviet spymasters to skedaddle from Moscow, headed toward friendlier climates, to be productively re-employed, helping their next master take control of the former Soviet spy networks. Was it China? China seems like a likely candidate, being well-positioned, eager, and having the resources.
But it easily could have been another opportunist who saw the possibilities. One closer to home, perhaps? American communists? Masons? The Vatican? A Rockefeller? Who knows.
…The question becomes, “all right, Jeff, now what?”
THE ROAD AHEAD
I started the post with Whitaker Chambers because it shows the unraveling of Twentieth Century global communism began with one man, a man who made a highly personal, moral decision to do something different. You can trace a line from Chambers to a second man, Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who published “The Gulag Archipelago” in 1973, straight through to a third man, Ronald Reagan, and from there to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
All the while, the Communists thought they were winning; the seeds of their inevitable destruction had been planted, were putting down roots and growing branches.
Here we are in 2022, a most remarkable year.
First, like Washington’s barefooted winter troops, the ragtag “Team Reality” volunteer army somehow defeated the pandemic’s worst excesses. Remember, it was only last January that the Biden Administration recognized Omicron and started backing down from all the mandates, just in time for the midterms.
Yesterday the Department of Defense officially ended the military mandate.
Also this year, Elon Musk made the totally irrational, anti-economic, wholly inexplicable decision to spend Solomon’s fortune buying Twitter — and against his own interests, promptly disconnected that platform from its government controllers. Now information is flowing freely again, a tsunami of truth washing out the pestilent enclaves of official disinformation.
The roots of censorship pre-dated the pandemic. In my research, I found the government’s war against the Neo-Flat Earth movement, which began in 2015.
Suspend your judgment about the merits of that movement for a moment to consider the broader implications.