Every now and then, you read a book that is just jaw-dropping good, and that is what Rebekah Koffler’s book Putin’s Playbook is. Usually, these days when I read a book, I’ve read thousands at this point, so I usually only learn three or four things per book, which isn’t much considering each one takes 10 to 20 hours to read. But this one had around 30 new things that I learned or hadn’t thought about before. I picked it up because of Steve Bannon on the Warroom podcast. Bannon usually has excellent references for books, and because of all the Russian stuff these days, I thought it might be a good idea to read Rebekah’s book. She was, after all, one of the top DIA intelligence officers who often briefed the top VIPs of our nation and often members of the White House directly. Hearing from her what kind of person Vladimir Putin was would help understand the Ukraine situation. After all, Rebekah was a native-born Russian and moved to America for all the right reasons. She was in a great position to understand the Russian view of the world, so I approached her book as one of those learn a few things books but had no expectation for it to be as good as it was. It’s so good I would recommend everyone buy it and take a week off work to read it once it comes. It will be some of the best time you will ever spend on anything. We are in an information war presently, so the more information you can consume and explain to others, the better your side is prepared to win that war. 

I was not surprised to read about a person I have talked about for a long time in Putin’s Playbook, Yuri Bezmenov, the well-known ex-KGB spy who came to America to warn us about what the Soviet Union was doing to convert America from a capitalist country to a communist one with a four-step plan. I have covered Yuri a lot, there are many YouTube videos about him, and he was even featured on one of the latest Call of Duty games. He is not science fiction or conspiracy theory. What he warned the world of was a real threat and still is. But people didn’t listen to him, and I didn’t understand why until reading Rebekah’s book. It’s a mystery I have been wondering about for four decades. And that mystery extended into the way Ayn Rand was treated. And Cleon Skousen. It’s not that people weren’t warned about communism from the Soviet Union trying to infiltrate our culture. Heck, the entire Democrat Party is a production of the Russian spy network that has been at work in the United States since 1919. Yet, our top officials never seemed to really care. Ronald Reagan cared, and many on the left hated him for it. They wanted communism in America, and they brought it into our culture in all the ways these writers warned. So why didn’t our government work harder to listen to them? Well, that is the compelling part of Rebekah’s story. The part that I didn’t know confirmed many suspicions I have had for a long time.   

It turns out that the real villain in the world is not Vladimir Putin. Sure, he wants to destroy America and everyone in it. Since he was a boy, he has wanted to do that because that’s what Russians do. They don’t have any words in their language for “fun,” so they look at the West as a decadent society of happy people that they want to destroy. It’s in their nature to do so; it’s purely cultural. One of the hardest things that the Russian spy network has always tried to figure out is how to emulate Americans while infiltrating our society. For the Russian-born working for the KGB, how do you convincingly simulate the American life of a carefree attitude about everything? In Russian culture, privation is an honor. To show how much you can endure is a measure of success. In America, they lived to have fun. They worked to have fun and buy things that were fun. Their aim in life was to be happy. How was a Russian supposed to simulate that trait when they had no point of reference for it? It’s a real problem for them and continues to be today. So, they’d love to get rid of us from the face of the earth. They have no desire to live in peace with America under any circumstances. But no, that’s not the most significant threat mentioned in Putin’s Playbook. No, the greatest threat to America by Russian attack is our American bureaucracy. 

Of course, that is a theme for me, but it was great to hear someone else say it, someone, who has worked with the top people in our government and understood the most dangerous people in the world intimately. It’s not the bad guys out there we have to worry about. Still, it’s their creations, the political left, and more specifically, the administrative state they have built from the ground up through years of communist influence starting with our education systems, then our businesses, and ultimately how our government functions. I have talked about the socialist movements in America going back to the Bellamy book Looking Backward, in 1888. But I didn’t know that Russians were trying to infiltrate the United States just two years into their Revolution in Russia under Lenin. That explains a lot. As I said, I already knew about Yuri, Cleon, and Ayn Rand. I didn’t realize just how effective their communist intentions already were within our own culture at the level of bureaucracy. Rebekah didn’t mean to expose all this; she just wanted to help her adopted homeland win the war in the world against the aggressors that were in it, like Vladimir Putin.    But it’s not Putin who we have to worry about; it’s the administrative state created by the political left in America. Now, it has made such a mess that the world terrorists who want to dominate the world no longer worry about America. Because they have built the bureaucracy in America from the ground up and know that it has paralyzed ambition to the point of ineffectiveness, this is why with Biden in the White House, Putin has made his move on Ukraine and is not worried at all about retaliation. Because he has given the West the poison they plan to fight him with; they are only entirely paralyzed to beat the Russians at a game they created over 100 years ago. Ultimately Rebekah was fired from her job, not for being incompetent. But because she was the opposite. She was too good, and the world of mediocrity, which spy agents have infiltrated America with, could not stand for exceptionalism to force their performance higher. So, they plotted at the DIA to get rid of Rebekah, and eventually, they did on some manipulated technicalities. The bureaucracy wanted to preserve its mediocrity from people like Rebekah Koffler, and ultimately that has become the policy of American politics.   They did the same thing to Trump. They intend to do it to us all. The fight isn’t over there in Ukraine; it’s down the road at the license bureau and the courthouse. It’s in our capitals, federal and state. It’s in our education institutions. And it’s on our nightly news. Everywhere, bureaucracy establishes a culture and is far more dangerous than Putin or any other modern character. And that is also why they want us to look at Ukraine while the real threat percolates right under our noses in an attempt to take over the entire world again and rule us all through mediocrity and a centralized state. 

Rich Hoffman