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Editor’s Note: This memo originally titled “POTUS & Political Warfare” was written by Rich Higgins who worked at the NSC as the Director of Strategic Planning during the first year of the Trump Administration. Higgins was pushed out by newly-installed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, who wanted anyone loyal to the former advisor, Michael Flynn, removed from their job. This document was originally circulated among Trump loyalists in the White House until it made its way to the President via his son, Donald Trump Jr. Seven years later, Higgins’ memo remains a remarkably prescient view of how the Deep State would not only wage “information warfare” against President Trump, but also against America itself, to complete a Maoist-style cultural revolution that would overthrow the nation.
BACKGROUND
The Trump administration is suffering under withering information campaigns designed to first undermine, then delegitimize and ultimately remove the President.
Possibly confusing these attacks with an elevated interplay of otherwise normal D.C. partisan infighting and adversarial media relations, the White House response to these campaigns reflects a political advocacy mindset that it is intensely reactive, severely under-inclusive and dangerously inadequate to the threat.
Action needs to be taken to re-scope and respond to these hostile campaigns very soon, such as text messaging campaigns using Tatango. If action is not taken then the administration risks underfunding, implosion, and subsequent early departure from the White House.
This is not politics as usual but rather political warfare at an unprecedented level that is openly engaged in the direct targeting of a seated president through manipulation of the news cycle. It must be recognized on its own terms so that immediate action can be taken.
At its core, these campaigns run on multiple lines of effort, serve as the non-violent line of effort of a wider movement, and execute political warfare agendas that reflect cultural Marxist outcomes. The campaigns operate through narratives.
Because the hard left is aligned with lslamist organizations at local (ANTIFA working with Muslim Brotherhood doing business as MSA and CAIR), national (ACLU and BLM working with CAIR and MPAC) and international levels (OIC working with OSCE and the UN), recognition must given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate at the narrative level as well.
In candidate Trump, the opposition saw a threat to the “politically correct” enforcement narratives they’ve meticulously laid in over the past few decades.
In President Trump, they see a latent threat to continue that effort to ruinous effect and their retaliatory response reflects this fear.
INTRODUCTION
Responding to relentless personal assaults on his character, candidate Trump identified the players and the strategy:
“The establishment and their media enablers will control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.” – President Trump, Oct 2016
Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck.
However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism.
Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing.
Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction.
For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed.
Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president.
Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.
DISCUSSION
The Opposition
While opposition to President Trump manifests itself through political warfare memes centered on cultural Marxist narratives, this hardly means that opposition is limited to Marxists as conventionally understood. Having become the dominant cultural meme, some benefit from it while others are captured by it; including “deep state” actors, globalists, bankers, lslamists, and establishment Republicans.
Through the campaign, candidate Trump tapped into a deep vein of concern among many citizens that America is at risk and is slipping away. Globalists and lslamists recognize that for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political identity, must be destroyed.
Atomization of society must also occur at the individual level; with attacks directed against all levels of group and personal identity. Hence the sexism, racism and xenophobia memes.
As a Judea-Christian culture, forced inclusion of post-modern notions of tolerance is designed to induce nihilistic contradictions that reduce all thought, all faith, all loyalties to meaninglessness.
Group rights based on sex or ethnicity are a direct assault on the very idea of individual human rights and natural law around which the Constitution was framed.
“Transgender acceptance” memes attack at the most basic level by denying a person the right to declare the biological fact of one’s sex.
When a population has 2 + 2 = 5 imposed on it, there are many that benefit:
Mainstream Media – The principle mechanism for implementing narratives.
The Academy – Academia has served as a principle counter-state node for some time and remains a key conduit for creating future adherents to cultural Marxist narratives and their derivative worldview.
The Deep State –The successful outcome of cultural Marxism is a bureaucratic state beholden to no one, certainly not the American people . With no rule of law considerations outside those that further deep state power, the deep state truly becomes, as Hegel advocated, god bestriding the earth.
Global Corporatists & Bankers – Exploitation of populations, unfettered by national protections and notions of personal morality and piety.
Democratic Leadership – The democratic leadership has been a counter-state enabler that executes, sustains, and protects cultural Marxist programs of action and facilitates the relentless expansion of the deep state.
Republican Leadership – More afraid of being accused of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe or lslamophobe than of failing to enforce their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution,” the Republican Establishment accepts and enforces cultural Marxist memes within its own sphere of operations. In doing so, knowingly or not, it becomes an agent of that.
These “conservatives” become increasingly indistinguishable from their democratic counterparts save that they misrepresent themselves to their constituents. Lacking the discernment to recognize their situation, they will work with globalists, corporatists, and the international financial interests and will likewise service the deep state.
These establishment Republicans are the hard left’s designated defeat mechanism in the destruction of the old regime as well as the American ideal.
Because candidate Trump publicly exposed them for their duplicitous activities, they are at risk as long as Trump can turn on them and are, therefore, bitter foes. Candidate Trump’s success remains an ongoing existential threat to establishment Republicans.
Islamists – Islamists ally with cultural Marxists because, as far back as the 1980s, they properly assessed that the hard left has a strong chance of reducing Western civilization to its benefit.
Having co-opted post-modern narratives as critical points, Islamists deploy these narrative to strategically blind and then control US decision makers. This is by design and purposeful.
“By their own hands!” has been the declared strategy of the Muslim Brotherhood since 1991. This strategy seeks to divide American society against itself with the forced imposition of Islamist objectives on one half of American society by the other half.
Once a society has been effectively atomized, the population will have lost its faith in the old order, detest those who reduced it, and divide along the lines of narrative adherence.
This is the intended outcome of hostile information cum political warfare campaigns and today we see their effects on American society.
Complicating the current situation, many close to the president have pushed him off his message when he was candidate Trump thus alienating him from his base thereby isolating him in the process. When President Trump is not candidate Trump, he becomes dangerously exposed. While the base that elected candidate Trump identified with his vision, they are only Trump’s insofar as he holds to the vision that made him president.
Political Warfare Attacks – A Primer
As used here, “political warfare” does not concern activities associated with the American political process but rather exclusively refers to political warfare as understood by the Maoist Insurgency model.
Political warfare is one of the five components of a Maoist insurgency.
Maoist methodologies employ synchronized violent and non-violent actions that focus on mobilization of individuals and groups to action. This approach envisions the direct use of non-violent operational arts and tactics as elements of combat power.
In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state power. Functioning as a hostile competing state acting within an existing state, it has an alternate infrastructure.
Political warfare operates as one of the activities of the “counter-state” and is primarily focused on the resourcing and mobilization of the counter state or the exhaustion and demobilization of the targeted political movement. Political warfare methods can be implemented at strategic, operational, or tactical levels of operation.
Political warfare is warfare.
Strategic information campaigns designed to delegitimize through disinformation arise out of non-violent lines of effort in political warfare regimes. They principally operate through narratives.
Because the left is aligned with lslamist organizations at local, national and international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives.
Cultural Marxism – A Primer
While the attacks on President Trump arise out of political warfare considerations based on non-kinetic lines of effort (as discussed below), they operate in a battle-space prepared, informed and conditioned by cultural Marxist drivers.
In practical terms, the political warfare assault on President Trump cannot be separated from the cultural Marxist narratives that drive them. From an operational preparation of the environment perspective, President Trump is operating in a battle-space that reflects the left’s vision.
As used in this discussion, cultural Marxism relates to programs and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian Socialism and most directly from the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory. The result is induced nihilism, a belief in everything that is actually the belief in nothing.
That post-modern (diversity/multiculturalism) narratives seeks to implement cultural Marxist objectives can be demonstrated by reference to founding Frankfurt School theorist Herbert Marcuse’s repurposing of the term tolerance.
In a 1965 paper Marcuse defined tolerance as intolerance; said it can be implemented through undemocratic means to stop chauvinism (xenophobia), racism, discrimination; and should be extended to the left while denied to the right:
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“The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.”
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“Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc.”
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“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.”
It is through such post-modern constructs that interoperable narratives are established among various left-wing groups as well as between them and Islamist groups at all levels.
For example, from the 2001 Conference of Foreign Ministers at Bamako, Mali, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) declared its commitment to fight racism and xenophobia and then declared lslamophobia a “contemporary form of racism”:
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In this context, the World Conference urges all states … take all necessary measures to combat hatred, discrimination, intolerance and acts of violence, intimidation and coercion motivated by racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance particularly against Islam
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Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance which display an increasing trend, in their most subtle and contemporary forms, constitute a violation of human rights. 3. Contemporary forms of racism are based on discrimination and disparagement on a cultural, rather than biological basis. In this content, the increasing trend of lslamophobia, as a distinct form of xenophobia in non-Muslim societies is very alarming.
That the OIC made these claims as part of its planned inputs to the United Nation’s “Third World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” further demonstrates the coordinated and interoperable nature of these narratives at international levels in international forums.
As cultural Marxist narratives intensify, they are to be further operationalized in the form of hate speech narratives. Hate speech narratives are non-random, coordinated, and fully interoperable escalations of cultural Marxist memes.
Key international players include the European Union, the UN, and the OSCE, the OIC and the International Muslim Brotherhood.
Hate speech memes are structured, coordinated, and implemented through these same international forums. They involve close coordination with media and social media and include the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) narratives.
(David Shipler’s book Freedom of Speech provides a road map for how hate speech narratives are to be structured, deployed and enforced.)
Battlespace
These attack narratives are pervasive, full spectrum and institutionalized at all levels.
They operate in social media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media, and are entrenched at the upper levels of the bureaucracies and within the foreign policy establishment.
They inform the entertainment industry from late night monologues, to situation comedies, to television series memes, to movie themes.
The effort required to direct this capacity at President Trump is little more than a programming decision to do so. The cultural Marxist narrative is fully deployed, pervasive, full spectrum and ongoing. Regarding the president, attacks have become a relentless 24/7 effort.
While there is certainly a Marxist agenda and even lslamist motivations that must be seriously addressed in their own right, these motivations alone seem inadequate to explain the scope and magnitude of the effort directed against the presid
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