Yuri Bezmenov decided he wanted out of the KGB and the Soviet system some 56 years ago while serving in New Delhi, India. Disguising himself as an American hippie, he defected to the U.S. Embassy and debriefed with the CIA.
It was decided that Bezmenov should settle in Canada under a new name for a while. Bezmenov came back to the U.S. in 1980 with a mission to educate people about Soviet "ideological subversion," which is the basic systematic methodology communists use to take down countries and establish Marxist-Leninist socialist-type states.
More recently, a Chinese defector and immigrant, Xi Van Fleet, has been on a crusade to warn Americans about the parallels between what is happening in America today and what Mao did in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The systematic plan Bezmenov revealed involves four fluid stages of communist subversion: 1) Demoralization, 2) Destabilization, 3) Crisis, and 4) Normalization. In "Mao’s America," Xi Van Fleet explains how Mao’s destruction of the “Four Olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) is being replicated by today’s leftist cancel culture in the U.S., which, she says, will end what is left of freedom in America if not stopped.
Demoralization
In Bezmenov’s analysis, the first stage, demoralization, can take a generation or more. One of its main thrusts is to undermine the Judeo-Christian beliefs, customs, habits, and traditions that have been foundational to America; these parallel the “Four Olds” that Mao destroyed in China.
Included in customs and traditions is the destruction of the family, which communists want to replace with the state. Xi Van Fleet points out that just as the Chinese Cultural Revolution turned children against their parents, American families are under increasing attack. Government welfare programs that reward single mothers with more money by having more children have certainly undermined traditional family formation. Public schools, the medical establishment, and popular culture, which support the transgender movement, have also turned children against their parents.
A third demoralization strategy is breaking people’s loyalty and love for their country by rewriting history, denigrating founders and national heroes, and destroying historic monuments—again, one of the key “Four Olds.” In summary, the goal of demoralization is to disconnect people from the virtue of the past and render them unable to assess what is true.
Bezmenov argued demoralization was the most important and hardest-to-reverse stage, since it targeted how a population interprets reality itself rather than any single institution.
Destabilization
According to Bezmenov, the second stage, destabilization, which builds on the first stage, is to advance society’s disorientation, a condition wherein the masses feel bewildered and powerless. While intentionality has never been proven, the China-originated COVID-19 pandemic brought massive destabilization and disorientation in the U.S. with mandated masking, social distancing, quarantines, lockdowns, mass vaccination, and the abandonment of tried-and-true medical practices, such as quarantining only the sick, and recommending the use of proven preventive and therapeutic treatments.
Another important part of destabilization happened early in the COVID-19 crisis after the death of George Floyd. Narratives of systemic racism in law enforcement were used to trigger rioting, looting, and the destruction of several billion dollars’ worth of property, along with the tearing down of historic statues and memorials in many cities across the United States.
Americans became further destabilized when they realized government authorities were unable or unwilling to do anything about the destruction in big cities across America. There were few arrests while more than 2,000 police officers were injured. Destabilization may have reached its peak when cities with the most lawlessness, such as Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, initiated efforts to defund local law enforcement.
Crisis
Following destabilization is the crisis stage, which is often an insurrection or a coup. An unprecedented crisis stage for America came in November 2020 with election fraud, which is itself an act of sedition as an organized undertaking of disrupting the nation’s foundational mechanism to choose its government. Sedition typically focuses on the preparatory steps—such as organizing or inciting actions to disrupt the government.
Democrat operatives had exploited the fear factor of COVID-19 in the summer months of 2020, visiting every one of the six swing states with a mission: to change voting rules to accommodate expanded mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and extended vote-counting deadlines—all of which facilitate vote fraud.
The crisis that ensued from obvious election and voting irregularity was deepened by legacy media and social media censorship and cancellation campaigns that organizers within the government began well before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The Department of Homeland Security division called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, better known as CISA, collaborated with the Stanford University-based NGO Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) to suppress information that would help Trump.
EIP also launched a campaign to prevent the public from challenging the anticipated voting irregularities by getting agreements from all the social media companies—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and Pinterest—to modify their customer terms-of-service policies to incorporate language about “delegitimization.” Once that was accomplished, according to Mike Benz, a former U.S. State Department communications policymaker and an expert on propaganda, the door was opened to algorithmic mass censorship and cancellation.
EIP exerted pressure on all the social media companies to adhere to their customer service policies and censor, cancel, or deplatform any content that contained “delegitimized” (aka “debunked”) narratives about new election protocols and “processes,” election “issues and outcomes,” “mail-in ballots,” “early voting,” “drop boxes,” and “Antifa,” to name a few.
The media treatment of the Hunter Biden laptop story that broke in mid-October 2020 in the New York Post illustrates just how quickly the channels of propaganda and media manipulation fall into place. The laptop story (which contained massive incriminating evidence revealing a compromised Joe Biden family), was immediately delegitimized and taken down from every social media site. At the same time, 51 former top intelligence officials signed a letter, published in Politico and picked up by The New York Times and The Washington Post, stating that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
After the 2020 election, social media effectively delegitimized and thwarted discussion about election fraud. Again, EIP insisted that social media companies uphold the terms-of-service contracts that required a continuation of censorship of social media content containing newly delegitimized terms, such as “Stop the Steal,” “dead voter rolls,” “Sharpiegate,” “stolen election,” “ballot harvesting,” "Dominion Voting Systems," and “Postal Service,” to name a few. Additionally, people who questioned the integrity of the 2020 election were marginalized by the media labeling them as “election deniers.”
Bezmenov’s four stages are fluid, so demoralization and destabilization continue in the crisis stage. We see this with lawfare against Donald Trump, his aides, and some 1,200 Jan. 6 protest participants arrested by the FBI.
The target is not just Trump and his supporters. Many Americans who witnessed this see that law enforcement and the justice system in America had devolved into a resemblance to the procedures and protocols of banana republics. With equal justice under the law and respect for the Constitution being mocked, the subliminal message is, “This is not the America you know; it’s a new world that you have entered, so get used to it.”
Normalization
While America is still in the crisis stage, some subversion experts argue that the lawfare, censorship, and cancellation regimes that targeted the delegitimization of vote fraud that now exist are really part of the last stage of communist takeover known as normalization—Bezmenov’s fourth and final stage.
Trump did succeed in rapidly closing the borders, but many people have come to accept that there is no certainty about vote fraud or a rigged election in 2020, just as they are not sure about the legitimacy of ICE in removing illegal immigrants, just as they have gotten used to a two-tiered justice system, some limitations on free speech, and taking down historic statues and monuments. If all of this becomes the new normal, our constitutional republic that was the United States will be gone, and the new world of communist global elite control will be empowered.
Fortunately, it appears the recent speeches by President Trump, Secretary of State Rubio, and Deputy Chief of Staff Miller show they all got the memo from America’s second president, John Adams, who unequivocally warned, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” It is time to turn the tables on the destroyers.
Scott S Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. His book, Rediscovering America—a previous #1 new release in history at Amazon for eight straight weeks—captures the essence of this year’s Quarter Millennium 250th anniversary of America’s founding Declaration document (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599). Reach him at scottp@discovery.org