The Crisis Of 2025
We are already in the danger zone.
I’m not easy to shock (though easily disgusted), but a development from last week genuinely took me by alarm.
X (formerly Twitter) user Yashar Ali explains what’s going on:
Over the past 24 hours, thousands of TikToks (at least) have been posted where people share how they just read Bin Laden’s infamous “Letter to America,” in which he explained why he attacked the United States.
The TikToks are from people of all ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Many of them say that reading the letter has opened their eyes, and they’ll never see geopolitical matters the same way again.
Many of them — and I have watched a lot — say it has made them reevaluate their perspective on how what is often labeled as terrorism can be a legitimate form of resistance to a hostile power.
This is not limited to TikTok; similar videos have been posted on other social media platforms.
The Guardian had a copy of “Letter to America” posted, but once these TikToks went viral, the Guardian took it down, which has only led to more interest in the letter and conspiracies from TikTokers who say this is part of the media and the powers that control it trying to silence the truth.
Accompanying Ali’s tweet was a video gallery of numerous individuals reacting to Osama bin Laden’s letter and explaining how it changed the way they viewed 9/11. It features a diverse cast of characters, though Ali’s video showcased lots of women and non-Whites (not sure if something’s going on there). Watch the video for yourself if you need proof that this isn’t just the latest right-wing outrage. It’s not. It’s real.
What it all means, according to Wesley Yang:
Rod Dreher was more blunt [bold mine]:
I wrote Live Not By Lies warning about the totalitarian effects of wokeness, including how this ideology would destroy reason, and teach you to determine good and evil on the basis of identity (racial and otherwise). Now it’s happening at scale. One aspect of the apocalypse (unveiling) after 10/7 is the extent to which we in America, and perhaps throughout the West, are being prepared for civil war. The Chinese are exploiting this, but the rise of Critical Theory gave them a lot to work with.
American self-hatred is nothing new. And I know there were people out there who thought America, on some level, courted, if not deserved, 9/11. Once upon a time, at a more impressionable age, I empathized, if not sympathized, with the argument too. But it’s another thing to see it manifested in a social media movement and how many people are claiming that they see things differently now than they did just a short time ago. It’s been many, many years since I last believed America asked for 9/11 and I thought if there was anything Americans still had in common, it was a belief that 9/11 was a terrible thing and that our country was worse off for it. I certainly never thought America deserved 9/11. I know there were people out there who thought that, but I also believed they comprised a minority.
I may have been right then. I’m wrong now.
How wrong am I? Even TikTok had to release a statement in hopes of downplaying concerns the social media platform was allowing for the dissemination of support for terrorism. Pay attention to the parts I’ve bolded:
While TikTok said reports of it trending were inaccurate, the #lettertoamerica hashtag on TikTok had 13.7 million views as of Thursday afternoon. “Letter to America” also trended on X, the platform formally known as Twitter, where there were more than 82,000 posts.
“Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,” TikTok said in a statement on Thursday. “We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform. The number of videos on TikTok is small and reports of it trending on our platform are inaccurate. This is not unique to TikTok and has appeared across multiple platforms and the media.”
So according to TikTok, it’s not trending, but if it is, it’s because it’s showing up across the entire social media landscape, not just on TikTok. Boy, I feel better now.
Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper explained how these bin Laden sychophants are playing with fire:
Mark my words, at this rate, it won’t be long before some of these crazy Bin Laden fan-girls convert to Islam. They truly don’t seem to grasp that if they were to follow the mandates laid out by this letter that all their gay and trans friends would be put to death, brutally executed. They don’t understand they’d be owned by men from the cradle to the grave. They wouldn’t be allowed to be educated (though we can’t say formal education has done much for these folks), and they certainly wouldn’t be airing their views on social media. There would be no more mimosa-fueled brunches, no freedom of movement, and no choices about what to do with their lives.
They just don’t understand.
Ignorance is bliss until it gets you a big fat dose of Shariah law.
This is what these bin Laden-ites don’t understand. Bin Laden regarded all of them as the enemy. He doesn’t make the distinction between “good” Americans and ‘bad” Americans. When Hamas raided Israel on October 7 and took all those people hostage, do they think they vetted each one at the time of capture to see what their political views were? Better yet, do you think bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers cared what the people at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon thought?
And:
I think the genie is out of the bottle, though. Our young people have been radicalized, which is something I’ve written about before. They’ve been taught by our education system and our media to hate America. Look at all the radicalized professors we see in the news saying shocking things lately.
And they really don’t have a clue how the real world works.
But the problem here is not that some dumb kids don’t understand the world. The problem here is that they have been brainwashed to hate their own country. And how will people who hate America ever defend her?
We’re watching the destruction of our culture in real time.
She’s right, but it’s not just a cultural collapse we should be worried about. There are far more tangible concerns in play here. Read on to find out what they are.
Yuri Bezmenov
Just as I heard about this social media trend, I began to recall Yuri Bezmenov and the warning he issued to the United States and the broader West 40 years ago. For those not familiar with Yuri Bezmenov, he was a Soviet defector who became famous for his writings and commentary detailing how the Soviet Union and communists, more broadly, were subverting the West, turning these societies against themselves. A former KGB employee before defecting to Canada, Bezmenov revealed the Soviet intelligence agencies did less work actively gathering intelligence a la James Bond, but more attempting to subvert adversarial societies.
The work of Bezmenov, who died in 1993, has drawn great interest and remains controversial to this day. Much of it surrounds the question of how successful foreign powers have been at subverting the United States and the West. If you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know I think it’s been extremely successful, though I’d argue that the Soviet Union largely failed in its attempts. Rather, the successful attempt came from within the U.S. and the West.
Before going forward, what does subversion entail? It involves four steps: demoralization, destabilization, crisis, and normalization. I think the definitions of these terms are pretty straightforward and Bezmenov explains them pretty well, so I’ll let him speak for himself.
In 1984, he wrote a book called Love Letter to America, published under the pseudonym “Tomas Schuman.” It contained a chart outlining the subversion process. Pay particular note to how long each stage of subversion takes:
By the way, see anything else familiar in there? Anything you might’ve heard some crazy guy talk about on some blog?
Anyway, let’s unpack subversion and explore how it’s happening today in America.
Demoralization
In a famous 1983 interview with G. Edward Griffin, Bezmenov elaborated on the process:
The demoralization process in [the] United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years... actually, it's over-fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such a tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans, thanks to [a] lack of moral standards.
Again, this was 1983 and Bezmenov was saying demoralization was already complete. He may have been correct, but I also believe the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with nearly all other communist powers, put a halt to the subversion process. However, it’s true that by that point, our institutions, particularly education and the media, were already heavily-populated by the very people who not only propagated subversive ideas to new generations, but hold leadership positions today. In that sense, a lot of the heavy lifting was done over three decades ago and the Left had a clear pathway to resume the subversion process.
More:
As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his... then he will understand. But not before that. That's the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.
I discussed demoralization in my last essay. The objective of demoralization is to break a society’s will to resist. It forces one to be excessively self-critical to the point you start to see yourself as bad and worthy of condemnation. It then leads you to do the same to society, then your country. At the very least, it neutralizes you as a form of opposition. At worst, you become a willing participant in the progressive demolition of your own country so others can take it over and establish a new order - their order.
Bezmenov continued:
So basically America is stuck with demoralization and unless... even if you start right now, here, this minute, you start educating [a] new generation of American[s], it will still take you fifteen to twenty years to turn the tide of ideological perception of reality back to normalcy and patriotism.
Wow. That’s a blackpill. The families of crime victims, particularly White victims at the hands of non-White perpetrators, contextualizing the deaths of their loved ones or publicly making peace with it in a ritual that has become entirely performative might be cringe to watch, but it’s a comparatively mild form of demoralization. When people start sympathizing with someone who murdered 3,000 of their fellow countrymen in an attack that eventually led to the unwinding of the social fabric, that society will invite all sorts of barbarism and invaders to “correct” the problem that is us. It’s happening as we speak.
Bin Laden’s character rehabilitation is, in many ways, the culmination of the subversion process - a man whose death we celebrated just 12 years ago has become the hero in the minds of many Americans. Looking back on it, one could argue a new demoralization effort began at the turn of the century, after the “break from history” that was the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the short, intense burst of patriotism following 9/11. Arguably the most unifying moment in American history, certainly within our lifetimes, also exposed the country to a brand-new attempt at further breaking our ability to resist. Over 20 years later, that demoralization effort has come full circle. And the worst part is, we’re stuck with it, as Bezmenov said, and it could get worse.
But there’s more than enough damage done making it possible to move onto the next step.
Destabilization
This where the rubber meets the road:
The next stage is destabilization. This time [the] subverter does not care about your ideas and the patterns of your consumption; whether you eat junk food and get fat and flabby doesn’t matter any more. This time—and it takes only from two to five years to destabilize a nation—what matters [are] essentials: economy, foreign relations, [and] defense systems. And you can see it quite clearly that in some areas, in such sensitive areas as defense and [the] economy, the influence of Marxist-Leninist ideas in [the] United States is absolutely fantastic. I could never believe it fourteen years ago when I landed in this part of the world that the process [would have gone] that fast.
We are, without a doubt, in the destabilization phase of the process. Whether it happened intentionally or as a consequence, there’s no question 2020 was the beginning of this stage. You had as president someone the folks actually in charge of this country could point to as the source of all our problems. You had the pandemic, which gave our institutions, the expert class, and the managerial state a strong dose of credibility. Then you had the death of George Floyd and the racial moral panic that followed. All that pent-up demoralization was cashed in in a year of rage that led to the election of Joe Biden and the rise of the leftist “Pink Police State,” to borrow a Rod Dreher term. This regime, of course, pre-dates 2020 and even Trump, but it wasn’t until these two elements converged that it’s existence became undeniable and made clear who exactly was in charge, even as millions of Americans still pretend Trump or the old order of the 1950s are still running things.
Crisis, Then Normalization
This is all leading to something, something big, correct? You should’ve figured out by now that it already has, but the problem is that there’s probably something worse on the way.
Back to Bezmenov:
The next stage, of course, is crisis. It may take only up to six weeks to bring a country to the verge of crisis. You can see it in Central America now.
And, after crisis, with a violent change of power, structure, and economy, you have [the so-called] period of normalization. It may last indefinitely. Normalization is a cynical expression borrowed from Soviet propaganda. When the Soviet tanks moved into Czechoslovakia in ‘68, Comrade Brezhnev said, ‘Now the situation in brotherly Czechoslovakia is normalized.’
Again, consider 2020. Think about how quickly the country found itself in crisis, be it COVID or Floyd. It all unfolded a lot quicker than you might remember. The crisis may be spontaneous or it may be engineered. We’re not going to have a choice there and thus it’s less important to speculate how it’s going to happen and more important to focus on the fact it will and what the crisis will be. The lead-up to crisis is a slow burn, but once the fuse burns out, a rapid, violent reaction ensues.
I’ll speculate on what I think the next crisis will look like shortly. More wisdom from Bezmenov, for now:
This is what will happen in [the] United States if you allow all these schmucks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind[s] of goodies and the paradise on earth, to destabilize your economy, to eliminate the principle of free market competition, and to put [a] Big Brother government in Washington, D.C. with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale, who will promise lots of thing[s], never mind whether the promises are fulfillable or not. He will go to Moscow to kiss the bottoms of [a] new generation of Soviet assassins, never mind... he will create false illusions that the situation is under control. [The] situation is not under control. [The] situation is disgustingly out of control.
Walter Mondale is yesterday’s news, but the Regime today may have as deep a roster of these benevolent dictators than ever before, with one of them - Joe Biden - in the White House as we speak. What makes them benevolent dictators is an extreme cultural libertarianism - support for moral and intellectual degeneracy - combined with anarcho-tyranny and policing of speech, thought, political opposition, and economic activity.
When it comes to the economy, I was struck by the imagery of this press conference held by the White House discussing the cost of Thanksgiving dinner. There was something very Soviet about it, as if they were touting the performance of their planned economy:
Funny - these people claim they had no control over high prices, yet they want you to believe they’re the reason why prices are supposedly down? So either they do have control over prices or they’ve taken steps to assume control of prices, neither of which is particularly comforting, since we know what excessive government intervention in the economy inevitably leads to.
The point is that benevolent dictatorship is going to become a lot more entrenched in the coming years post-crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, crisis strengthens regimes, because people instinctively look to those in positions of authority for guidance and leadership. Only after years of prolonged, mounting, and insurmountable crisis does it end up destabilizing the regime itself. But we’re still a good ways off from that.
Residents of California have been living under a benevolent dictatorship for longer than most Americans. Governor Gavin Newsom is the best example of what the future holds for the country, especially as it continues to shift leftward politically and expects the government to do more, not less, to guarantee lifestyles and outcomes. If the government cannot keep its promises, then at least, they’ll need to show they’re in charge.
Gavin Newsom plays that role well. San Francisco very promptly cleared out the homeless and cleaned up blocks of the city in advance of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit. When it was pointed out to him they have yet to do that for residents of the city, here was Newsom’s response:
Spoken like a true tyrant. Again, if you can’t make the lives of your people better, you need to show you’re in power. Otherwise, you have no legitimacy. Expect more of this in the years to come.
Bezmenov concludes [bold mine]:
Most of the American politicians, media, and educational system trains another generation of people who think they are living at the peacetime. False. [The] United States is in a state of war: undeclared, total war against the basic principles and foundations of this system. And the initiator of this war is not Comrade Andropov, of course. It's the system. However ridiculous it may sound, [it is] the world Communist system (or the world Communist conspiracy). Whether I scare some people or not, I don't give a hoot. If you are not scared by now, nothing can scare you.
If you haven’t watched Bezmenov’s entire interview, I fully recommend you do. It’s a warning from the past:
It is a product of its time, however, and you’re way behind if you think the communists are behind the subversion. They may have been at one point, they might still be a part of it, but today, it’s all self-inflicted. The people attempting to subvert us today were made in the USA and they were cultivated under liberalism. They’re not communists, but more specifically, culturally Marxist. Cultural Marxism, the antecedant to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or what’s better known as “Wokeness,” has foreign roots, but my point is the threat isn’t emanating from Moscow or Beijing. It emanates from within - from Washington, from our university classrooms, on TikTok, from everywhere.
2025: Crisis Year
So what’s next? We’ve established we’re in the destabilization stage, which lasts from two to five years, according to Bezmenov. If we assume destabilization began in 2020, then we’re well within that vulnerability window where a crisis can pop off at any moment. Surely, we’ve been in a non-stop state of crisis for years now, but let’s not be too literal. I’m talking about a crisis which leads to a violent change of power, structure, and economy, to quote Bezmenov.
Next year, we have an election which is supposed to lead to a peaceful change of power if a new president is elected. However, I have my doubts events will proceed in orderly fashion. The Israel-Gaza war has exposed major fractures in the Left’s coalition, but elections also tend to be clarifying: it’s possible, a year from now, the Left will have put their differences aside to ensure they remain in control of the White House for another four years.
Either way, we’re looking at an extremely contentious election, to say the least. The prospect of Donald Trump returning to power won’t sit well with millions of Americans, to say nothing of the people who actually run this country. If Trump does end up in jail but wins the election, we’re going to be in a major political crisis; I’m not sure the Constitution contains any guidance on how to rectify such a situation.
If Biden wins re-election, expect normalization and the continued long march towards a totalitarian Pink Police State, rife with even greater levels of corruption and degeneracy, some of which is likely to flirt with barbarism. If crisis strikes, which it inevitably will, the march will become short and the establishment of the Pink Police State more abrupt and violent in a phenomenon known as “acceleration.” History, which for the most part is a story of boiling frogs, is punctuated by these dashes. Examples include 2020 and current events emanating from the Middle East.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter who wins in 2024. The outcome is the same regardless, the only difference being how quickly it happens and how much damage will be done in the process. I’m talking about superpower collapse. We passed the point of no return long ago and we have no choice but to weather the storm and survive it. Long term, the damage will be substantial, but intervening crises will make the short-term damage worse.
All this is to say that we’re looking at that crisis stage in either 2024 or 2025. The election is obviously the most obvious flashpoint, but if 9/11, 2020, or 10/7 taught us anything, it’s that there’s a good chance we won’t see it coming. It won’t take long for that crisis to materialize - Bezmenov says six weeks or two to six months - which means we’re not going to have much time to prepare by the time crisis becomes apparent. This will be an SHTF (S**t Hits The Fan) event and I fear it could be worse than anything we’ve seen yet.
I try my darndest not to scare anyone, but the warning signs are flashing. We are already in the danger zone. Certainly, Bezmenov wasn’t some oracle and it’s easy to turn his subversion model into a narrative. Still, it’s eerie how it fits into our current moment. More important, it’s factually indisputable that Americans are a demoralized populace. You can see it in polls and the way people talk about their own country. I’ve written on more than one occasion about how Americans have been deeply pessimistic about the direction of this country and its institutions for a long time now and how there’s little that can be done at this point to reverse those sentiments. Like Bezmenov says, if it took 15 - 20 years to demoralize a society, it’ll take at least as long to cure the malaise. Just look at post-communist countries. Many of them are still battling demoralization, among many other problems, to this day, despite the Cold War ending over 30 years ago.
All you can do at this point is to be aware, accept the hard truths, and prepare for the moment. You may not like the truth and you may not be looking forward to the day, but there’s luxury in knowing what’s to come. It won’t take you by shock, or at least the shock will wear off much sooner than it would for most. That said, don’t spend too much time wondering where we’re going to be a year from now. Get ready, then go back to enjoying life. 2024 is less than a month-and-a-half away and 2025 will be here before you know it.
Difficult To See. Always In Motion Is The Future
I wrote this piece thinking I’d have more to offer in the way of predictions, but I’m closing this out left with more questions than answers. The chaos of the present is making it harder to make short-term predictions, while long-term predictions have conversely become easier to make. I think our destination is largely predetermined at this point, it’s just a question of how long the journey will take and what obstacles we’ll encounter along the way.
What do you think? Does Yuri Bezmenov have anything to offer regarding our current moment? Do you think we’re in a different stage of the subversion process? If you think, as I do, we’re in the destabilization phase, do you believe a major crisis will strike in 2024 and 2025? What do you think it’ll be? What character will this crisis take?
Let’s talk about it in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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