For a brief, shining moment in 1945, the United States stood astride the world like a colossus. In four years, we had built the greatest military machine in human history, liberated half the planet, and dropped the sun itself on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prove the point. Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan (three empires that had terrorized the globe) lay in smoking ruins. The message was unmistakable: try America on the battlefield and you will be annihilated.

Our enemies learned the lesson. They have not seriously attempted a direct military confrontation since. Instead, they (and the ideological heirs of the totalitarians we defeated) chose a slower, more insidious strategy: death by a thousand cuts from the inside. What we are living through in 2025 is not a series of unrelated crises; it is the culmination of an eighty-year campaign to hollow out the greatest republic the world has ever known.

The blueprint was simple and brilliant in its evil. If you cannot invade America, infiltrate her. Capture her universities and turn them into indoctrination camps. Capture her media and make truth itself subjective. Capture her culture and convince her children to despise the very civilization that gave them freedom. Capture her institutions (the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon) and bend them toward the destruction of the country they once served. And above all, capture her borders, her currency, and her sense of herself as a sovereign nation.

Look around and tell me it hasn’t worked.

The same intellectual descendants of the Marxist-Leninist movements we spent the Cold War containing now openly run university departments, teachers’ unions, and human-resource divisions in every Fortune 500 company. They do not fly the hammer and sickle anymore; they fly the rainbow flag and preach “equity,” but the goal is identical: the abolition of the traditional family, the Christian church, private property, and the nation-state itself. Critical theory, cultural Marxism, wokeism (call it whatever you like) is just communism with better marketing and tenure.

The corporate media, once a proud Fourth Estate, now functions as the propaganda arm of a permanent bureaucratic class that hates the historic American nation. When a genuine populist movement arises (think Tea Party, think MAGA), the combined forces of Big Tech, Big Media, and Big Government mobilize with a coordination that would have made the NKVD blush. Elections are “fortified,” dissenters are debanked and deplatformed, and parents who complain at school boards are treated as domestic terrorists.

Our southern border is not merely “porous”; it has been deliberately erased. More than ten million illegal entrants since 2021 (many of them military-age males from countries that hate us) are not sending their best. This is not incompetence. It is demographic replacement dressed up as compassion, a modern-day population transfer designed to dilute the political power of the people who built and sustained this country for 250 years.

Our financial system has been captured too. The Federal Reserve, unaccountable to any voter, prints money without limit, deliberately eroding the savings of the working and middle classes. The national debt now exceeds $36 trillion (an amount so large it can only be understood as a weapon). Every dollar debased is a tax on every American who believes in hard work and thrift. The same globalist elites who lecture us about climate change from their private jets while they ship our factories to China, the same totalitarian state we once contained and now fund with our own consumer dollars.

And the institutions that once protected us? The FBI spends more time hunting down January 6 grandmas than cartel killers. The Department of Justice prosecutes pro-life grandmothers while ignoring Antifa firebombings. The Pentagon obsesses over “white rage” and proper pronoun usage while China builds a navy to rival ours and Iran races toward a nuclear bomb.

This is not paranoia. This is pattern recognition.

The tragedy is that most Americans still don’t see the war because it isn’t fought with tanks rolling down Main Street. It is fought in classrooms where children are taught to hate their country, in boardrooms where CEOs impose racial quotas, in newsrooms where stories are killed if they threaten the narrative, and in courts where unequal justice has become the new normal.

But here is the good news: the American patriots are waking up in numbers not seen since 1776. Skyrocketing homeschooling, the rise of parallel economies, and the election of outsiders who refuse to bow to the regime tell me the enemy has overplayed its hand. When you push a free people too far, they push back twice as hard.

We defeated the Axis powers in four years. We contained Soviet communism for forty-five. We can defeat this fifth-column insurgency too (but only if we name it for what it is: a deliberate, decades-long attempt to finish the job that Hitler, Tojo, and Stalin could not).

The America that turned the tide at Midway and Normandy is still in us. The spirit that said “nuts” to the Germans at Bastogne still lives. The question is whether we will recognize the enemy within before it is too late, or whether we will allow the greatest experiment in human freedom to die not with a bang, but with a whimper of “tolerance” and “diversity.”

The hour is late, but it is not over. Not yet.

M. Ray Evans, a U.S. Navy veteran who served his time, lives in Florida, with his wife, Grace. Recently retired after decades as a senior executive in international real estate development, working across more than ten countries, mostly in East Asia, where he built a solid track record over the years. A conservative and patriot by conviction.

Image generated by ChatGPT.