Importing pure evil into the main arteries of American life is a never-ending business for the radicals.

In the aftermath of the violent anti-war protests of the 1960s and 70s, it became evident to the leading communist groups (SDS, CPU, Raza, Black Panthers, Weather Underground, among many others) that a successful violent Marxist revolution would never happen in the United States.

Instead, the radical American left retreated mainly to the already ongoing processes outlined by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and the American Marxist grassroots activist and author of Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky. Both represented variations of the blueprint for revolution from within.

Gramsci’s theory of a “war of positions” within society’s institutions was not just ascendant but already becoming dominant in universities, colleges, and churches, achieving enormous success. The “long march [of Marxist theory] through the institutions,” a popular paraphrase of his strategy, became the cutting edge of the revolutionary knife, so evident in the past fifty years.

Alinsky’s community organizing model was also well-tested. It involved the more subtle methods of community agitation and interest group coordination to force changes at the local level. The models were the highly successful Industrial Areas Foundation and The Woodlawn Organization.

Alinsky’s model of community organization, summarized in Rules for Radicals published in 1971, was to “present [facts] and general concepts of change, a step toward a science of revolution.” His quip on how to gain political power and the utility of consensus decision-making was summarized in an interview with Playboy Magazine and has also become a mantra on the radical left, “Reconciliation means just one thing: when one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it.”

Radicals Now Just Call Themselves Democrats

While the Gramsci and Alinsky models may seem more passive than the violent revolutionaries of the anti-war era, the end product — the goal — was to produce a radical well-schooled in Marxist theory and prepared to win the revolutionary struggle by any means required. Gramsci wrote about the steady construction of the “collective will” and stated that his applications would progressively result in the final taking of power, overthrowing all existing economic and political systems.

Alinsky also wrote at length about the revolution as a product of the strategies of applying the collective power of individuals united in community action. “True revolutionaries,” he wrote, “do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits, and infiltrate the system from within.”

We’ve had three presidential elections in the last sixteen years, and what is clear is that the radical left’s revolution from within has rendered post-World War II liberalism dead as the corner phone booth. The radical left has become the Democratic party, a significant step in their ultimate goal.

In those sixteen years, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and Tim Walz have shown themselves to be the rotten fruit of a rotten ideological tree. [The appointed President Joe Biden was more clearly the face of the White House and tangential to the actual decision-making and governing process led by Obama protegees.]

Of course, Hillary Clinton worked for Alinsky and became personal friends with him. She wrote a college thesis, There Is Only the Fight… : An Analysis of the Alinsky Model, a critique of his work, and maintained contact with Alinsky from the time she attended law school until he died in 1972.

In 1985, Barack Obama became a “community organizer” on Chicago’s South Side with the Developing Community Project, where the 24-year-old Obama would learn how to employ and manage the Alinsky-modeled outreach to various churches and community groups in the area. In 1988, he wrote an article published in Illinois Issues, “Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” describing his experiences as an organizer, which later was incorporated in the book After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois by Peg Knoepfle.

‘A Radical’s Radical’

However, Clinton and Obama both seemed to believe that while the Alinsky model introduced an interesting working outline and tactics for community action — transferrable to political campaigns — it proved less a tool of revolution than a tool of agitation. Both concluded that it was not able to produce radical change fast enough.

Clinton and Obama emerged as national politicians who, while embracing radical means and ends, seemed far more interested in gathering great wealth once in office. (It’s interesting that all the purveyors of the radical death cult of Marxism are beguiled by great personal wealth. Putin, Xi, Maduro (and Chavez before him), the Ortega boys, and all the other radical Marxists end up fabulously rich!) Clinton and Obama became shrewd at camouflaging their core far-left radicalism and worked at presenting more nonideological personas, following the Alinsky model of “[doing]what you can and clothe [your intentions and actions in] moral garments.”

Unlike Obama, Clinton came from a conservative family background and even worked for several Republican campaigns until the late 1960s. Obama, however, like the current nominee via a coup, Kamala Harris, came from upper-middle-class roots and radical family backgrounds that are eerily similar.

Both of Obama’s parents — Barack Obama Sr., and Ann Dunham — were self-described radicals directly involved with Marxist organizations and atheists when they met. After Dunham and Barack Senior divorced, she married yet another Marxist activist, Lolo Soetero, an Indonesian government worker. Obama spent a few years in Indonesia and then was sent to Hawaii to live with his grandparents.

Perhaps the most crucial influence in Obama’s adolescence into his teen years was the dedicated communist author, poet, and journalist Frank Marshall Davis, who was extensively involved in the Communist Party in Chicago and Atlanta before moving to Hawaii in 1949. In 1971, Obama’s grandfather arranged for Marshall to mentor the nine-year-old Barack, and he did so for seven years, on and off. (Marshall infamously wrote an explicit, pornographic autobiography under a nom de plume Bob Green, Sex Rebel: Black, in 1968, which graphically detailed his manic sexual exploits, along with his wife, in swinging, group sex, including bisexuality and sexual relations with minors of both sexes.)

By the time Obama got to Occidental College, by all reports, he was a radical’s radical. One classmate recalls that he was “already an ardent socialist Marxist revolutionary” and that “he sincerely believed a socialist revolution was coming.” It would be no surprise that once in Chicago, Obama became close friends with William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, perhaps the best-known and still unrepentant communist violent radicals out of the 1960s had segued into full professorships.

His obsession with reracializing America and “fundamentally transforming” the country began in his first days in office.

A Rich Radical

Like Obama, Harris’s upper-middle-class upbringing was surrounded by ultra-radicals and revolutionaries. Her mother, Shyamala, was herself a “privileged” daughter of the Indian Brahmin caste. Her father, Donald J. Harris, grew up in the Jamacia and came to the US in 1961 to study at Berkley and met Shyamala there. They both became active radicals at Berkley, supporting pro-Marxist causes and organizations promoting Castro and other communists, as well as Bobby Seale and Huey Newton — who would leave Berkeley in 1966 to found the communist Black Panther Party.

Harris’s parents divorced in 1972, and her mother went on to have a high-profile career as a cancer researcher, while her father became a Marxist economics professor at Stanford.

Kamala Harris, then 30 years old, started her political career through her relationship as paramour to Willie Brown, then the 60-year-old Speaker of the California Assembly and the most powerful individual in California politics. Brown was married but separated at the time. In 1994, Harris received her first appointment to a plum political job with little actual work and a high salary, followed by another ending in 1998. (Brown himself had extensive communist ties, both as Speaker and later as mayor of San Francisco.)

Harris now is a veritable flagship for Marxist catchphrases and policies in her public appearances. She talks about the “collective” in a communitarian manner. Much like Clinton, with her “it takes a village” theology, Harris doesn’t speak to individualism but rather in terms of the community of interest that overrides other values and family. She campaigned in 2020 as willing to “confiscate” firearms, end fracking, and put the entire country on Medicare for all without private health insurance options.

Perhaps her thoughts on free speech and the right of the government to control it at every level are the most glaring indication of her formative years and thinking patterns. She previously discussed the First Amendment and free speech as a “privilege” that can be taken away when speaking about Donald J. Trump. Of course, she is part of an administration actively working with online platforms to censor speech. Her prosecutorial and political language don’t reflect an interest or appreciation of the Constitutional Republic or the Rule of Law but outright hostility. She peddles a coded collectivist mindset of Marxism that she grew up in.

The fact that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz made 30 trips to China with students in tow over many decades is a statement in its own right. Taking his honeymoon there is yet another. One student claiming that he purchased and handed out Mao’s Little Red Book like candy is still another. (The campaign has not challenged the student traveler.) Indeed, the governor seems a bizarre and almost farcical addition to the campaign, but he is a man of the radical left.

Taken together, all of this merely points to the obvious. The constitutional premise and the unique founding of the American experiment are under horrendous assault. The radical Marxist contingents control the high vantage of institutional control. Abraham Lincoln said the American experiment was the last best hope of mankind. It remains so just barely.

When you exile the truth for a lie — when Marx is more important than Moses — you invite in the darkness of spiritual corruption. From there, the battle for the soul of liberty and freedom becomes more demanding and the risk greater.

Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture, and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.