We Have Been Losing an Ideological War
We have been losing an ideological war for more than half a century while insisting we were only fighting political or military ones.
In April 1975, as the Vietnam War was ending, U.S. Army Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. met with his North Vietnamese counterpart, Colonel Tu, in Hanoi. Summers said, “You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.” Colonel Tu paused and replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
While American forces were winning the conventional battles in Southeast Asia, international communism was conducting a far more successful campaign on American soil — an ideological and psychological war. Mao’s Little Red Book circulated openly on college campuses. Revolutionary ideas took root in universities, media, and cultural institutions. The battlefield victories proved hollow because the political ideology, cultural confidence, and shared reality back home had been steadily undermined.
Fast-forward to 1989. The Soviet Union and the Communist bloc collapsed. America and the West appeared to win the great political, military, and economic contest of the Cold War. Yet once again we had fought the visible political struggle while largely ignoring the continuing ideological offensive inside our own society. That war never ended. It simply changed form and went deeper.
Today the results are visible everywhere. Society is being deliberately divided along lines that mirror Mao’s Cultural Revolution playbook. During that upheaval, Mao deliberately turned China’s youth against the elders. He mobilized radicalized students and young Red Guards to attack teachers, parents, intellectuals, party officials, and anyone associated with traditional authority or the “Four Olds.” The Four Olds were ‘old ideas’, ‘old culture’, ‘old customs’, and ‘old habits’. Young militants were encouraged to hold public struggle sessions in which elders were humiliated, beaten, forced into false confessions, tortured, murdered or driven to suicide. Countless teachers, scholars, and officials — the very people who carried knowledge and continuity — were destroyed or broken. The goal was to shatter generational bonds, erase inherited wisdom, and leave a population that no longer trusted its own past or its own leaders. That same logic of engineered generational and social conflict is being replayed today through identity politics that pit young against old, men against women, and every other conceivable group against one another.
This is the ground on which we now stand. And it is precisely this condition of ideological exhaustion, division, and eroded shared reality that makes a newer and more sophisticated form of political control so effective. While these division tactics were being refined in the West, a parallel and more sophisticated method of control was being developed in post-Soviet Russia…
The Shape-Shifting Theater of Power
In Russia after the Soviet collapse, a group of men recognized that widespread cynicism and uncertainty about the future could be turned into a tool of power. They became known as “Political Technologists”. They took control of the media and treated reality itself as something that could be shaped and reshaped at will.
One of them went further. Vladislav Surkov came from the avant-garde theater world and imported its techniques into politics. His aim was not merely to lie or to push a single narrative. It was to play with people’s fundamental sense of what was true, so they would eventually stop trying to understand what was really happening.
He used state money to sponsor groups across the entire spectrum — anti-fascist movements, neo-nazi skinheads, liberal human rights organizations that attacked the government, and even political parties that presented themselves as opposition to Putin. Then he made sure everyone knew he was behind it. The result was deliberate, cultivated confusion. No one could reliably tell what was genuine and what was managed, what was opposition and what was controlled release. As one journalist observed in Russia, it created “a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable.” Real power remained hidden behind the spectacle. This method is still active.
Something similar has taken root in the West, and especially in America. In modern American parlance, “Who is grass roots and who is a fed”. Look at the recent releases of the Alt-Right, 1488, Antifa, and all sorts of left wing Communists and Socialist organizations being funded from well know NGO’s or the U.S. Government itself. We already carry deep ideological wounds from decades of unopposed subversion at home. Into that weakened condition came a politics of constant theater: endless outrage cycles, viral spectacles, shifting alliances, and competing versions of reality that grow harder to reconcile by the month. Scandals that once might have produced broad demands for accountability instead become new fuel for tribal division. The underlying direction of the country — on borders, institutions, demographics, and culture — often continues with remarkable continuity no matter which side holds the spotlight on any given day.
The shape-shifting does not create the division by itself. It exploits divisions that were already being widened by the longer ideological campaign. It keeps the population emotionally mobilized and strategically confused, so that coherent resistance to deeper transformations becomes nearly impossible.
Re-moralization Before Education
Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov explained the first stage of ideological subversion as “demoralization.” Over roughly fifteen to twenty years, a society’s values, institutions, history, and self-confidence are systematically undermined through education, media, and culture until ordinary people can no longer accurately assess reality or summon the will to defend their own way of life. They become cynical, apathetic, or turned against themselves. Facts and arguments then bounce off them.
That is why even hundreds of well-researched articles can feel like they change nothing. Information alone cannot reach a demoralized people. The first task is re-moralization — restoring a confident, positive sense of being American again. Only when people once more feel rooted in their history, their founding principles, and their peoplehood can genuine education take hold and the shape-shifting theater lose its grip.
In every conversation, every space, and every piece of content we create, we should ask ourselves four simple questions:
- Does this make me feel more American?
- Is this conversation dividing us?
- Does this speak to the genuine interests of my people?
- Have we accepted a narrative that was gaslit into us by our ideological enemies?
Only after we have begun to re-moralize — to recover clarity, pride, and cohesion — can the deeper work of education and institutional recovery begin in earnest. Until then, we remain spectators in a theater designed to keep us confused and powerless. The moment we start answering those questions honestly and acting on them, the spell starts to break.
© James Sewell 2026 – All rights reserved
A Personal Note from James
I have spent years researching and writing about the long patterns of displacement, propaganda, and institutional capture that have reshaped this country. But I have come to see that even the clearest historical work can be neutralized if we allow ourselves to be drawn into the very divide-and-conquer dynamics our ideological adversaries rely upon.
They pit sub-groups within our own people against one another — generation against generation, region against region, class against class, or political faction against political faction. Then they sit back and watch the spectacle unfold. In many cases they amplify or quietly fund voices on multiple sides, ensuring that the confusion deepens and that no one can be entirely certain what is authentic opposition and what is managed release. The result is the same shape-shifting theater we see operating at scale today: enormous energy expended on internal conflict while the deeper trajectory of the nation continues largely unexamined and unchallenged. We have all seen how the left has been infected by Communism. However, Few people understand that many of the rights talking points have been poisoned by communism.
When Hermann Göring was asked at Nuremberg how the Nazis had been able to lead one of the most educated populations in history into catastrophic war and dictatorship, many expected a long, intricate monologue. They assumed a man of his intellect, extremely high IQ, and command of history would lay out the sophisticated, multi-layered strategy the NSDAP had used to capture the body politic and the public mind. Instead, Göring gave a far simpler answer. When Hermann Göring was asked how it had been possible to lead one of the most educated populations in history into what followed, the answer came down to one sentence: “Hitler made us feel German again.” That simple; He re-moralized his people.
Those that know me, know that I am far from amenable to any Führer principle or the NSDAP as a framework forward. Having said that, we do need to take good information from where it comes, regardless of ideology. We need to do the same as Göring’s answer. Make people feel American again — rooted in their founding principles, their history, and their continuity as a people. Only then will the internal spectacles lose their power and the long work of education and recovery become possible again.
This is re-moralization.