A Template for Political Terror in America

The building blocks of this essay have been swimming around in my head for a couple of years but until now I had not been able to string all the pieces together. What made the difference for me was that I finally sat down and read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO (which you should go do yourself, right now, it’s that good), and suddenly all the pieces began to fall into place.

ISOLATING “THE OTHER”

This all started with a thought I had after re-watching JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG. That thought was “Nazism was just Identity Politics taken to its most logical conclusion.” And from that realization came the thought that this has been true literally everywhere murderous totalitarian regimes have popped up throughout human history. In fact, the more you look, the more you begin to see patterns, and the more those patterns start to look like a universal Template for Political Terror.

To see what originally got me thinking about this, take a moment to watch this critical scene from JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG where disgraced former German Judge Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster) describes how the Nazis came to power in Germany.

It’s a chilling scene, fantastically acted and directed, but let’s focus in on Janning’s retelling of what Hitler said to the people of Germany, how he exploited their fear and misery, because that’s the meat of what I’m going to call “The Template.”

“There was a fever over the land. A fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that – can you understand what Hitler meant to us. Because he said to us: ‘Lift your heads! Be proud to be German! There are devils among us. Communists, Liberals, Jews, Gypsies! Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.’ It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb.”

I’ve highlighted and underlined five crucial words. The first is (obviously) the leader of the regime, “Hitler”… the next four were the targets of his hatred (Janning’s “sacrificial lambs”), in this case “Communists, Liberals, Jews, and Gypsies.” But what happens if we replace those five words with something different? What if we treat Janning’s speech like some twisted genocidal version of Mad Libs?

If we change those words to “Stalin; Kulaks, Priests, Tsarists, Mensheviks” we get the Russian Red Terror.

If we change them to “Mao; Professors, Clergy, Artists, Non-Leftists” we get the Chinese Red Guard

If we change them to “Pol Pot; Intellectuals, Buddhists; Ethnic Non-Cambodians” we get the Cambodian Genocide.

I could go on-and-on… Human history is, unfortunately, jam-packed with examples, but the key point is that only the leader and the targets need to change. Nothing else. This template is all you need for runaway oppression and murder.

Sometimes the target of a specific brand of totalitarian terror is so irrelevant that it actually changes over time if the reign of terror lasts long enough. During the Red Terror, The Bolsheviks started out imprisoning and murdering upwardly-moble peasants (Kulaks), a category that had its own ever-shifting defintion. But by the post-war period, 25 years into the Soviet reign of terror, Stalin was literally murdering anyone and everyone… from shopkeepers who were the first to stop clapping after a Party speech, to Muscovites who refused to flee the City as the Nazis advanced and who fought a bitter war of resistance long after the city had been abandoned. Stalin’s theory was that they might have been hanging around not because they loved Mother Russia, but because they secretly wanted to become Germans. Stalin even imprisoned and murdered repatriated Russian Prisoners of War because he was worried that, having spent time in “free” Western Europe, even as prisoners, they could no longer be trusted.

Again, it really didn’t matter whom Stalin or his predecessors targeted. It was all pretext, either way. A pathway to power and control. Once they ran out of people to kill in one category, they simply created another category and went right on killing. As it turned out, the more capricious and unpredictable the imprisonment and murder appeared to the citizenry, the more effective it was as a means of control.

The specific target is immaterial… only the template matters. If they want to imprison and execute you and you don’t fit into the categories they’ve already inserted into the template, they’ll simply insert a new one.

But so what? What does a bunch of crazy Russians arresting and murdering their own citizens a hundred years ago have to do with America in 2021? Well, it matters because we are seeing something very similar occur right now, this constant redefining of political enemies in order to widen the net of potential “internal threats”, under the Biden Administration.

In the days just after the events of January 6th, 2021, an “Insurrectionist” was defined simply as the four hundred or so people who actually entered the Capitol Building on January 6th. But when 400 Insurrectionists didn’t scare the country badly enough, or allow the Democrats to sieze enough power, the definition was broadened to include anyone who was at the protest that day, even if they went nowhere near the Capitol. And when that wasn’t enough, they broadened the definition again to include “Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” in general, even if they weren’t in Washngton at all on January 6th. And when even that wasn’t enough they finally definied “Insurrectionist” as anyone who voted for Trump.

And yet still they’ve discovered that the “Threat to our Democracy” 1/6 represented just hasn’t been resonating with the population at large, and public interest in the 1/6 Commission’s investigation is flagging. So now Attorney General Merrick Garland has sicced the FBI on Parents who attend School Board meetings to protest against things like Critical Race Theory in their schools, calling them a “threat to Democracy” and suggesting they might be “White Nationalists” or even “Domestic Terrorists.” In the wake of this story, Tucker Carlson played a video compilation of anchors on CNN, MSNBC and other networks alleging, without evidence, that these protesting parents were “backed by a secret cabal of White Nationalists.” Not only is that an outrageous slur, but it rubs up uncomfortably close to the infamous Nazi slur that all of Germany’s post-war problems were the fault of a secret cabal of Jewish conspirators.

That’s how fast it can happen, guys… January 6th was nine months ago as I write this.

Why is it so important to keep pointing this out? Because the American Left refuses to acknowledge that political terror can come from their side of the ailse. It’s why they relentlessly push poison like Critical Race Theory and Antifa violence, because they believe that radicalism in service of Progressive goals is no vice. That their brand of political terror is different and acceptable because it comes from the Left and targets the Right, which they have defined as irredeemable and evil. But all they’ve really done is adopt the Totalitarian Template, which requires nothing more than filling in the blanks.

For The American Left, they’ve begun to fill in the blanks with White People, or Republicans, or MAGAtards or Anti-Vaxxers or Proud Boys or TERFs or whatever the boogey man of the day is. They believe, as the Bolsheviks and the Khmer Rouge and the Maoists believed, that they are on the side of righteousness. They are “protecting the Country” from its internal enemies. Therefore, nothing they do can ever be wrong. And certainly it can never be evil.

That’s why, when The Left talks about political terror, the conversation must always begin and end with the Nazis, because we think of them as Right Wing Fascists. It would be counter-productive to the Leftist cause to point out that the Bolsheviks imprisoned and murdered innocent Socialists because they were insufficiently Leftist. Or that the Chinese Communists and Khmer Rouge imprisoned and murdered Liberal Professors for the same reason. It would harsh the narrative of Universal Left Wing righteousness.

But we have to acknowledge the Template. And we have to call it out when we see it, because it’s happening again. And it’s happening here. Americans institutions are awash in an extremist vision of Identity Politics. A fantasy of political terror that has begun to include things like refusal of service in private sector establishments over political differences, denial of critical healthcare for those who won’t obey Government orders to get vaccinated against COVID, and literal “re-education camps” for the same, among other classic Totalitarian horrors. We’ve even seen some of the folks charged with misdemeanors in the wake of January 6th held without bail and forced to publicly recant their support for Trump as a condition of their plea bargains.

A Maoist Struggle Session by any other name, would smell as foul.

IDEOLOGY AS A FORCE MULTIPLIER

Solzhenitsyn also wrote that “to do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good. Or else, that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law… the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses because they had no ideology. Ideology… that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification.”

What he’s saying here is that political ideology is a force multiplier for Political Terror. Shakespeare’s various killers were never animated by ideology and so their body counts “stopped short of a dozen.” It takes the full apparatus of Government fueled by ideology to murder millions.

The Far Left has adopted the Template here in America and now they are building out the ideology so that they can fully implement it. They do not worry that their efforts could lead to the imprisonment and murder of innocent millions because they have convinced themselves, as every first time Heroin user does, that they are somehow uniquely immune from the awful power of the Template. That they are Leftists, and therefore righteous, and so whatever they do is in the service of the long arc of justice. And anyway, they can stop any time, man!

At the end of JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, Ernst Janning asks to see Judge Haywood (Spencer Tracy) in his jail cell. In that meeting he begs Haywood to believe him when he says “I never thought it would come to that.” Haywood’s final words to Janning are… well, see for yourself.

Haywood knew that the Template always leads to the Gulags, no matter who uses it. In that sense it is very much like The One Ring from the Lord of the Rings novels… no one but the Dark Lord can wield the ring… “it has no other Master”, says Aragorn. And much like Frodo faced his own moment of truth on the rim of Mt. Doom, whether or not we arrive at a dystopian Totalitarian America in the near future, depends on how we meet this moment.

But what is the ideology of effective political terror? We must hear and understand it if we are to counteract it. Put simply, that ideology is Identity Politics. That’s what the Template categories are all about… defining the “Other” that must be eliminated by some easily definable indentity characteristic that is different from that of the ruling party. “Those people must be eliminated because they are Jews”… or “Those people must be eliminated because they are Buddhists”… or “Those people must be eliminated because they belong to the wrong political party”… or “Those people must be eliminated because they are Vietnamese or Armenian”… or even “Those people must be eliminated because they worship God above the State.”

The Nazis based their template primarily on race. The Bolsheviks, Stalinists and Jacobins based theirs on class. And the Chinese Maoists and Khmer Cambodians based theirs on political and ideological purity. In 2021 America, the pressure is building on the Marxist Left for a purge based primarily on Ideology (Republican/Conservative), and secondarily on race (White/Heterodox Minorities who refuse to toe the Progressive party line).

You can watch it happening in real time:

Several times in the last two weeks, Joe Biden has described the entire Republican Party as a “threat to Democracy” in private meetings with Democratic lawmakers and Corporate CEOs.

In August, the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to the Biden Administration urging them to use the Patriot Act (the Patriot Act!) to investigate concerned Parents who have been showing up at School Board Meetings to push back against the masking of very young kids and the teaching of Critical Race Theory. The NSBA asserted without evidence that these parents are violent and must be classified as “Domestic Terrorists.” Amazingly, Attorney General Merrick Garland heartily agreed and has directed the FBI to investigate Parents who have been doing nothing more than asserting their First Amendment Rights to “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Back in June, a lecturer at the Yale Medical School named Dr. Aruna Khilanani told her students that she fantasizes about killing white people.

Hollwyood has hung a sign on its door that says “whites need not apply“.

Almost every other day you can find an article or a podcast featuring a prominent activist musing that the only way to end “White Supremacy” would be to eliminate White People altogether.

And in response to these urgings delivered from on high, modern day Leftist Brownshirts are approaching Legislators, Governors, and even Agency Heads and Media figures in public places (including public bathroom stalls and in Fishing supply stores) to accost them over differences of political opinion… sometimes, as with Rand Paul, they even physically assault their targets in the process. In many cases, this is happening with the full-throated support of the Leftwing media outlets they have captured. These are not attempts to persuade. Make no mistake, these are clear attempts to enforce political power via the threat of physical violence.

The Template is beginning to take shape…

MARKETING TERROR

Once you have properly defined “The Other”, once you have defined the “devils” as Ernst Janning called them, once you have articulated your ideology, you must sell the cause to your followers with relentless enthusiastic repetition. You might even call it “Marketing.”

Solzhenitsyn describes how the NKVD and the Soviet Government sold the Red Terror to the populace, by teaching that it was a “patriotic struggle against the internal enemy.” But the identity of the internal enemy is always determined by those who are in charge. In 2021 America, the American Left controls the Media, Academia, Big Tech, and increasingly, America’s corporate boardrooms… having achieved that level of control, they have set about the next stage of the template… defining the “Internal Enemy.”

It’s all there in the language of the Left… “Cancel that speaker”, ‘Deplatform those ideas”, “Stop normalizing those opinions”, the obvious Orwellian contradiction of shouting “Silence is Violence” while simultaneously claiming that “Speech is violence”… and what is the endless evocation of “preserving our Democracy”, as Biden does almost every day, if not a modern-day twist on “the struggle against the internal enemy”?

If you truly believed that one group of people was a “threat to Democracy” and that they were actively trying to bring down our Government and the Country, what wouldn’t you be willing to do to stop them? As I write this, Liberal thought leader Jonathan Chait has published an article with the headline “Anybody Fighting Joe Biden is Helping Trump’s Next Coup.” Got that? Everyone from Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul on the Right, to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on the Left are part of a Trumpian plot to overthrow the Government by force.

Well…

In the face of an imminent violent takeover by “Domestic Terrorists” or “White Nationalists” or even the improbable “Trump plus Kyrsten Sinema” alliance, most people would consider using violence to stop that takeover well within bounds. That’s the danger of this kind of rhetoric, and we saw it play out four years ago when a Bernie Bro named James Hodgkinson acted on the anti-Republican rhetoric in which had immersed himself and tried to murder all the members of the GOP softball team.

ROOTING OUT THE INTERNAL ENEMY

Read this story of a college volleyball player forced to watch an anti-American film inspired by BLM theory, to which she was required to express fealty. She refused, and was punished. This has all the hallmarks of a Maoist struggle session. It was also a trap designed by a paranoid organization obsessed with ideological purity to discover anyone on the team with impure political thoughts… to expose the “internal enemies” in their midst. Kylee McLaughlin refused to submit, and so she had to be punished.

Fortunately, we have not yet reached the point in our political evolution where there was anything they could do to Kylee besides kick her off the team and try to cancel her, which is bad enough of course, but at least she is alive and not in a Gulag. For now, at least, these struggle sessions must still take place in the dark and in secret, because when normal Americans hear stories like this, they react with disgust and horror. Kylee may even win her lawsuit against the team and get rich in the process. But at some point, if people continue to refuse to submit, then stronger measures will be called for.

A PASSING PHASE?

Now, of course, I know a lot of reasonable Democrats who disagree with the radical CRT/BLM/AntiFA wing of the party, and they would say I’m being hyperbolic. They freely acknowledge that there have been plenty of muderous Left Wing regimes throughout history, but that it could never happen here in America. The radical crazies are not even close to a majority of the Democratic party, they say. But that was true in Pre-Nazi Germany as well. The Nazis were never a majority of the German population… until all of a sudden, they were.

How could that have happened? Well, let’s look again at this critical line from the Template as described by Ernst Janning:

“What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded… sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows. We will go forward. Forward is the great password.”

This is how it happens. Good and decent people who are afraid to stand up to evil simply shrug it off as a passing phase, because like Vaclav Havel’s Green Grocer, what else can they do? And it is this inaction, this turning away from reality, this unwillingness to engage with evil ideas that allows the truly committed to sieze and consolidate power unapposed.

Or, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, “Communists define peace as the absence of opposition.” I would’ve said ‘Totalitarians” but then I don’t have 20 million committed listeners, and anyway Rush (RIP) was close enough.

Back in June, Megyn Kelly did a podcast with Sohrab Ahmari about Critical Race Theory in schools. Megyn mentioned that she had to pull her kids out of their tony New York Private school because of CRT and that many of the other parents at the school were just as concerned as Megyn was, but were unwilling to speak up. Sohrab asked Megyn how those parents responded when Kelly asked them to join her and speak out against CRT.

They told her… “It will pass.”

And on and on it goes.

Eventually, the descent into political madness either does actually fade away like a high fever, just as Ernst Janning and his countrymen hoped the Nazi movement would, or else society reaches some kind of critical mass where rhetoric flips over into violent action. At that point, the question becomes how many people like Dr. Aruna Khilanani or Ibram X. Kendi or Eric “Nuke ’em” Swallwell or Maxine Waters would need to be in positions of power in America before we’d start to see a descent into real political oppression, violence, and murder? And would there be enough of us left to effectively oppose them?

Obviously I’m not trying to argue that political oppression could never come from the American Right, after all we had our Red Scare and the House Unamerican Activities Committee back in the 50’s… 70 years ago. What I am saying is that because almost every American knows who the Nazis were and what they did, our society has always been on guard against political violence from the radical Right-Wing. If nothing else, our Government’s starkly different reactions to the 1/6 riots on the one hand, and AntiFA’s violent firebomb attacks on multiple Federal Buildings on the other, should be proof of that.

But Americans have always had a blind spot for Left Wing political violence. Just this week Representative Nancy Mace got the FBI to admit that they don’t even bother to track incidents of political violence committed by AntiFA. And with the dumbing down of High School and College level history courses, very few Americans have any working knowledge of the vast crimes committed under the Bolshevik Red Terror, or the Khmer Rouge, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or North Korean Juche or even those crimes committed by the Weather Underground right here in the U.S.A.

Indeed, one of AntiFA’s best-known unofficial mottos is “Punch a Nazi”, but if I were to say “Punch a Marxist”, most Americans would respond “Huh? Why?” There is not a single mainstream American organization that identifes openly with the Nazi movement, not one. But Black Lives Matter, one of 2021 America’s most powerful political organizations, openly brags about its Marxist underpinnings in its founding documents. Our new Comptroller of the Currency is an enthusiastic fan of the former Soviet Union. And our Government is full of prominent intellectuals who dream of bringing the Chinese model of top-down Socialist control to the United States.

That’s a blind spot folks. And as every boxer knows, the blind spot is where the knockout punch comes from.

THE TICKING CLOCK

But no matter how the template gets filled in, once the process begins to gain momentum, the result is always denounciations, midnight arrrests, mass graves and millions, MILLIONS of shattered lives.

Some of the things I’ve been discussing here have been developing for a several years now, since the Trump Administration… the demonization of White Americans and the pushing of CRT in our schools gained steam during the George Floyd protests two summers ago. But many of the most disturbing of these developments have occured in just the last ten months.

Things are accelerating.

Krystallnacht, often cited as the beginning of the Nazi Reign of Terror in Europe happened in 1938… a few short years later, in 1942, the Nazi High Command got together and worked out the details of the “Final Solution.” Only two years after that, millions were dead, including 6 million Jews gassed and burned in the ovens of Concentration Camps across Europe. It happens fast, and time may be shorter than we think.

I’ve made enough Godwin jokes on Social Media over the years that I have to admit to feeling a little silly comparing the American Left in 2021 to the birth of the Nazi Party in the early 30’s, but this is a case where it’s better to overreact a little. If this all blows over, as Ernst Janning hoped it would, I will happily admit that I overreacted and breathe a heavy sigh of relief.

I’m even willing to admit that there is a constituency on The Right that’s looking to “do it to them before they do it to us.” It’s clear that there is a large group of Trump voters who want him to return as President, not just because they liked his policies, but because they want revenge… for the BLM riots, for the COVID lockdowns, and for everything the Biden Admin has done in its over-the-top war against those with whom they disagree over the last ten months. The general idea is that if we’re going to be ruled by a Strongman, we’d prefer it was one of ours and not one of theirs.

But the Right does not control the Government right now. And even if the Right begins to recapture Government in 2022 and 2024, the Left will still control all the non-Governmental levers of power throughout the Media, Hollywood, Big Tech, and Academia. Certainly, the Right will never control the vast army of unelected bureacrats, the “Deep State”, who direct the Federal Agencies that can make our lives miserable on a whim… “The Department of Making You Sad” as survivalist blogger Jack Spirko likes to joke.

It is from those places, ultimately, that the Template will be birthed. JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG makes it clear that Naziism was propped up and enforced not by the SS, who were relatively few in number, but by everyday professionals like Ernst Janning who went along to get along… the “Good Germans”, of whom there were millions.

The Template, when launched, eventually develops a momentum all its own. And there comes a time when that momentum can no longer be stopped. Once that rubicon is crossed, it’s already too late. The slope always gets more slippery the further along the continuum one travels.

It’s the President’s job, fundamentally, to work against the slipperiness of the Template, to try and turn down the temperature on rough political rhetoric whenever he can. We must here acknowledge that Trump did not live up to his responsibilites at all in this regard. But Joe Biden, who ran on a return to civility and unity has done the Trumpian opposite of what he promised. In almost every case he has taken the very action designed to most inflame the opposition. Worse, when Senator Kyrsten Sinema was accosted in the ladies’ room by activists, including at least one man, Biden refused to categorically condemn the tactic, calling it instead “part of the process.” And just like that we moved a little further down the slippery slope to a place where the threat of political violence is now just “a part of the process.” We wouldn’t have to slide very much further down the slope before we could find ourselves at a place where actual political violence becomes “part of the process” too.

To that last point, as far as I know, no one has ever been arrested for physically assaulting Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham and other members of the Congress and the Senate as they were leaving the Republican National Convention in D.C. in the Fall of 2020, even though the entire incident was caught on video. And to the extent that this violence was meant to help deliver the White House and the Senate to the Left, it was wildly successful.

That is an incentive structure, my friends, and you’d better believe that the Left’s Brownshirts noticed.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

I honestly don’t know.

A lot depends on whether or not we are already sliding down the Template’s slippery slope. Some very serious Conservative thinkers like Victor Davis Hanson and Roger Simon have begun to wonder if we aren’t headed for a violent National Divorce. And as I’ve already argued, even if the Republicans take back the House and Presidency over the next three years, if we truly are in the grip of the Template, then all the GOP could really do would be to slow things down a little. And if the Left does lose control over the levers of Government power over the next four years, the other institutions that have been captured by the Left, like Academia, Big Tech, the Media and Hollywood, will almost certainly return to their Trump-era levels of blind fury and things could actually wind up getting worse.

I’m afraid that our only real option is to hope that when we roll the dice, our result is luckier than the one Ernst Janning and his countrymen got… to hope that this truly is just a “passing phase.”

But that’s not to say we can’t do anything. We should be preparing for the worst, and in many ways, that’s exactly what’s happening. We are already seeing a mass migration of Conservatives out of big blue states like California and New York, headed for the more welcoming climes of Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and Florida. I think that’s a positive sign. It’s strengthening Conservative States and the communities within them to better allow them to weather the storms of hostile action, Federal and otherwise, that could be headed their way in the coming years. A strong network of Red States working together can better resist ridiculous intrusions like major corporations, Coke, Delta, Disney or the NCAA or NBA vowing not to do business in their States. That’s good, and woke organizations need to made to understand that their virtue signalling will not come without cost.

Continue to reach out to potential allies in Minority communities as well. Black, Latino, and Asian Conservatives are in just as much danger from this version of the Template as are White Conservatives. For the Thought Crime of pushing back against Woke Progressive orthodoxy, Black Conservative thought leaders like Jason Whitlock, Tim Scott, Daniel Cameron and Candace Owens are routinely called “Skin Folk but not Kin Folk” by Woke gatekeepers in the media like Joy Ann Reid. Even Joy Reid seems to understand that calling them “Uncle Tom” is beyond the pale, but that’s really what she means. Larry Elder was described by the Los Angeles Times as “The black face of White Supremacy” for having the temerity to run for Governor against White-but-Woke Gavin Newsom. And there are a couple million Cuban Republicans in Florida who will be standing right alongside the White Folks in the Gulags, if it comes to that.

Get involved at the local level. Run for your Local School Board. You may feel ideologically alone, but you have more allies than you think. Watch any video of Parents confronting school boards across the country and of course you’ll see plenty of White Parents, but you’ll also see plenty of Diverse Parents as well, including recent immigrants who bravely step up to the microphone to declare “hey, we came to this country specifically because we were trying to escape this divisive Third World garbage. We don’t want it brought into our schools.” The keepers of the Template want you isolated and afraid, don’t let them have that.

We need to build and embrace diverse ideological communites even as we build physical ones. Communties based on a shared love of Country, of Liberty and self-determination, and with the goal of realizing Martin Luther King’s dream of a society where people are judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. We must, in other words, resist stumbling and falling into our own race-based versions of the Template.

Look, I don’t like the idea of putting my tail between my legs and running away anymore than you do. I’m a stick it out and fight kind of guy by nature, but I also understand self-preservation and I’m a disaster prepper. I prep for all kinds of disasters, not just the natural kind. Because I understand that the universal Template for Political Terror is a man-made disaster worse than any hurricane that has even been.

As I tell my kids when we’re walking in the city… keep your head up and your eyes out. Talk to your neighbors, and strengthen your communities. The Green Grocer gave in because the Communists made sure that he had no way of knowing that there were others just like him that would stand behind him when the chips were down. We cannot and should not make that same mistake.

The clock is ticking.