If I Wanted to Destroy America, Here’s What I’d Do…

Destroying America wouldn’t be so easy, but it could be done. That being said, given the size of our country, our economy, our military, and our nuclear arsenal, it would almost certainly need to be an inside job.

The only people that could truly cut America off at the knees would be Americans. We might need a few powerful bad actors that genuinely want to see America cut down to size, maybe so that they could build some kind of imaginary socialist utopia in its place, but they wouldn’t have to make up most of the people crippling the country.

You get enough Americans aimed in the wrong direction and then combine them with the Americans who aren’t paying attention or who see the problems, but are just too complacent to do anything about it and next thing you know, America would be just the latest once-great nation to turn into an also-ran. Greece, Italy, Egypt, and the Soviet Union could tell you all about it.

So, how would I do that to America?

Well realistically, I’d have to start by reducing the quality of the people. As Samuel Adams said:

How would I break a culture full of people who have long been world-famous for being God-fearing, smart, industrious, patriotic, and independent?

Well, it’s not easy, but all things are possible with time and the right slippery slopes.

I’d start by convincing people that the Christian church is too judgmental, intolerant, and just isn’t relevant for these days and times. Who needs functional, proven two-thousand-year-old principles in the modern era? Forget about that stuff! It’s too limiting! Just tolerate everything, don’t judge anybody, and “be nice,” whatever that is defined as, and that’s all it takes to be a good person.

Once you get a society to that point, everyone is just going to do their own thing, morals are increasingly going to devolve down to the lowest common denominator, and the whole society is going to morally go straight into the gutter. How can it be any other way if everyone defines what they’re doing as “good” and no one wants to be accused of being judgmental or intolerant for saying they’re not?

Besides, who’s to say that Christian morals are any better than Satanism, radical Islam or whatever passes for morality on Reddit these days? Who decided that? In America, the answer to that was once, “Pretty much everyone,” but in a world that revolves around not judging people, being tolerant, and creating your own moral codes based on whatever standards you like, it wouldn’t work like that anymore.

Changing a Christian country to a group of atheistic hedonists would be a slow process, so it would be helpful to speed it up. For example, if we could find a way to get huge groups of weirdos to congregate online in forums and chat rooms, we could convert little streams of humanity into oddballs who can’t properly function inside of society.

Of course, the place we could really do some damage on this front would be in the school system. If schools relentlessly worked to convince kids that they’re simultaneously the most talented, brilliant people alive but also so fragile they may have a panic attack if they hear something discomforting, get them to question their sexuality, and even - I know this sounds too outlandish to really happen - but promote the idea that they should be gay, can you even imagine how much damage you could do? Especially if we focused on teaching these kids that their own country is bad while giving them a mediocre understanding of history that emphasizes our country’s flaws while underselling its great accomplishments.

Ideally, we’d also want to have radicals, communists, gender warriors, and mental cases handling the teaching of these kids, both in high school and college as well instead of the sort of sober, serious, patriotic professionals that have traditionally taught our kids.

Granted, this is a great way to corrupt the youth of America, but it’s not enough. We’d need to make sure that these kids stay ignorant, so building a culture that revolves around say hedonism, avoiding discomfort, and seeking fame would be helpful.

Maybe we could create a bunch of social media sites with nasty, mean-spirited, vapid cultures that only provide a partisan surface-level understanding of issues, but that would also be entertaining enough to keep people clicking for hours. We’d want to reduce people to the point where not only would they lack the attention span to read a book, but we’d also want them to have trouble making it through anything that wasn’t highly entertaining in the first sixty seconds or so. Anyone who gets to this point would be doomed to be hopelessly ill-informed about well… pretty much everything.

If we could get people there, we’d find that the media would devolve into nothing but another form of partisan entertainment because that’s what their audience would want. They won’t have the patience or tolerance of boredom needed to read about real issues day in and day out, but “That person you don’t like? They’re even worse than you think! Also, want to hear some gossip and outrageous stories?” – that they could sell.

As the people increasingly went off track, America’s government would inevitably follow. Soon, politicians would be creating drama to get people’s attention on social media and saying anything that sounds good, because they’d know the media didn’t have the credibility to fact-check them and the public wouldn’t have the morals or the memory to punish them for doing the wrong thing.

We’d want to try to create the sort of government where being a sociopath would give a politician a huge advantage. Once you get both parties loaded up with people like that, productive government will grind to a halt as grandstanding politicians take the most divisive and destructive positions imaginable either to cater to their donors, to enrich themselves, or just because it benefits “their side” at the expense of everyone else in the country.

Next thing you know, politics would be strictly adversarial, and every square inch one side gained would be at the expense of the other. If things got that bad, the border would probably be open, spending would get so out of control it threatened the existence of the country, we’d have zero quality control on people we allowed to immigrate here and we wouldn’t have the national will to tackle any real problem. Meanwhile, as all the critical problems were ignored, we’d be having national debates about how many billions of dollars we’d throw away on unwinnable foreign wars and pie-in-the-sky global warming scams.

You may say, “Wait, what about the military and the economy? What would you do to them?” Look at what I’ve described and ask yourself if I’d have to do anything to them to make them dysfunctional.

How well do you think the economy is going to do over the long haul when it depends on a bunch of people who struggle to read a book, will cry if you offend them, need to be constantly entertained, and think a 40-hour workweek is a herculean effort? America’s businesses better hope that AI and robots are ready to go soon because if they’re relying on the generation I described above, they’re in a lot of trouble.

Similarly, building a functional military out of a populace that mostly isn’t capable of effectively serving and that’s taught to hate everything the military has stood for since our founding isn’t going to work long-term either. Saluting the flag? That RACIST flag? Having rigid standards? Why, how can you do your own thing in that environment? Working as a unit? What about catering to me? Taking on tough challenges under hard conditions? That doesn’t sound comfortable! Killing people that threaten America? Who’s to say we’re right? Good luck recruiting people like that and worse yet, imagine what those people will do to the military when you do recruit them and they start to get into positions of power. It’ll be a disaster.

Eventually, the mistakes of America’s incompetent government will increasingly weaken the country, we’ll face some kind of crisis and then the American people will need to suck it up and prove themselves under extremely difficult circumstances as they did in the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, WW1, Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, WW2, Cold War, etc., etc. and guess what? This time, they won’t be up to the challenge. This time, the hole they’ll be in will be too big, the American people won’t be resilient enough and the country will shatter.

Maybe it’ll split into pieces, there will be a civil war, or our currency will become so worthless that you can use it for toilet paper, but the long and short of it is that we’ll take a big step down. Maybe we’ll recover and still be a big player like Britain or turn into a third-rate power like Turkey did after the Ottoman Empire, but we’d effectively be destroyed, and America would never again rise to the same heights that we’ve already reached.

That is how I’d destroy America and chances are, it would work. Let’s hope no one ever actually tries it.

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