Have you ever been listening to someone talk and have déjà vu even though you’ve never seen or heard of the person speaking, and the interview you’re watching happened just a few hours before? I have. Once. Last week. Hint: It has to do with America’s destruction.

I was listening to Tucker interview Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese native who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China. She eventually immigrated to the United States, where she’s now lived for 40 years. Listening to her describe the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution and its eerie echoes here, I knew I’d heard something similar before.

And then it hit me: I had. Exactly 40 years ago, a defector from the Soviet Union, Yuri Bezmenov, gave an interview explaining how the KGB was using what it called Ideological Subversion to collapse the United States.

Now, these two interviews weren’t remotely the same. One was from a KGB operative, someone who was part of the Soviet system suppressing the Russian people and who became disillusioned and defected to the West, while the other was from someone who experienced the CCP’s suppression before immigrating to the US.

Nonetheless, although given exactly 40 years apart, the two interviews taken together paint a very stark picture of America today and going forward. They reminded me of a technique that is often recommended for effective public speaking: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you’ve just told them.”

Bezmenov lays out the KGB’s plan—ideological subversion—for sowing America’s and Western Europe’s collapse. The plan involved four elements, which he carefully explained:

1) Demoralization—15-20 years to re-educate one generation.

This is done through uncritically introducing Marxist ideology into schools without counterbalancing it with basic American values, patriotism, and morals. Eventually, a significant segment of the population will become immune to accurate information.

2) Destabilization—2-5 years to destabilize a nation.

The goal is to destabilize the nation via the economy, foreign relations, and defense policy.

3) Crisis—as little as 6 weeks to bring a nation to crisis. (George Floyd, anyone?)

4) Normalization. For this, I’ll let Bezmenov’s words speak for themselves:

This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schumcks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind of goodies and paradise on earth. To destabilize your economy and illuminate the principle of free market competition and to put a big brother government in Washington DC with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale.

Your leftists in the United States, all the professors and the beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion. Only to destabilize the nation. When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore. They know too much. Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxists / Leninists come power they get offended they think they will come to power. That will never happen of course. They will be lined up against the wall and shot.

That last sentence is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what Xi Van Fleet says happened in China…twice. The first involved the peasants who put Mao in power in the first place. They were repaid for their efforts by being chained to their farms, and, between 1958 and 1962, fifty million of them starved to death. Then, in 1969, three years after the Cultural Revolution began, Mao turned on his Red Guards. These were literally children who had been his stormtroopers. They were too unstable to keep around, so he either had the military kill them or he sent them to re-education camps.

AI Image created by Vince Coyner.

Xi’s story is a tragic one, but as she walks through it, you hear echoes of exactly what is happening in America today. After 16 years of brainwashing, Mao had his young Red Guards ready to terrorize the nation. They used violence and language control. Suddenly, propaganda was everywhere. Everything old had to be destroyed while law and order were dismantled. The police were told to stay out of the schools, which were the beating heart of the Revolution. Police also couldn’t respond if Red Guard members attacked them.

All this resembles how two generations of American students have been indoctrinated in the fiction of Climate Change and the gay and trans agendas, as well as the manipulation of language and discourse via the prohibition of words and ideas. Statues tying America to the past have been torn down. Add in the defund the police movement, the violence after George Floyd, and the lack of consequences for criminal behavior, and we have exactly what Bezmenov discussed and Xi described. Whether it’s climate activists, supporters of “Palestine” (AKA antisemites), LBTQXYZ123# harassers, or Antifa & BLM rampaging through cities, they’re all playing their parts in the play the KGB wrote, which Western communists adopted after the Berlin Wall collapsed.

What’s more, both refugees from tyranny discussed what America is becoming, he by predicting it and she by chronicling it. Whether it’s reporters being arrested, protesters sent to the gulag, or the regime using lawfare to harass its rich and/or popular opponents, the rules never apply to those in power. It’s not that there are no rules; they just don’t matter.

The Soviets had a constitution that guaranteed a wide variety of civil liberties, and the Chinese constitution guarantees “citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration.” We have our Constitution, which currently provides about as much of a limit on government as a spaghetti strainer does on water.

The funny thing (as in, not really funny) about all of this is that the leftists who think they’re going to be running things once the crisis blossoms into a full-blown tyranny will likely be the first to go. Whether Stalin’s erstwhile supporters who fell in the Great Purge or the Chinese Red Guards who fell to the guns of the military, those who are at the vanguard of leftist revolutions often find themselves victims of the very powers they put in place.

As we watch powerlessly as our great cities devolve into crime-infested dystopian nightmares; George Soros-impelled DAs and prosecutors smile as they demonstrate their two-tiered legal system; the federal government actively subverts efforts to secure the border; cities cut services to citizens and veterans to give illegals billions; schools and hospitals and states empower the brainwashing and butchering of children; and the Uniparty in Washington runs up trillion dollar deficits and sends tens of billions to Ukraine, we begin to recognize what Bezmenov called Normalization.

A decade ago, Americans of most stripes would have understood that this was a disaster in the making. But now we’re told that all of it is not only normal, but you’re a racist, homophobic, transphobic white nationalist if you disagree with any of it.

The outcome in November will decide which path we take. The thing to remember when we walk into those voting booths is that Bezmenov and Xi had a place to escape to for freedom: America. We don’t have that luxury. Vote accordingly.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.