Joe Bast | August 27, 2023
There are books you read that leave you wishing you had read them long ago. They shine light on things you have long wondered about or dismissed without adequate study as being unlikely or even a “conspiracy theory.”
A consequence of not reading such books when you are young may be that you go through life with a faulty theory of social change in your head. You might spend the best years of your life barking up the wrong tree, as they say.
“The Naked Capitalist” by W. Cleon Skousen (1913 – 2006) is such a book. Self-published in 1970, it is an important document from the anti-communist movement of its day, but like so much of the literature of that period it is now looked down on as an over-reaction to the politics of the day or as unreliable propaganda from a battle that is long since over. That’s a shame because the book is neither.
Skousen’s book opens with two questions, presented in all capital letters: “WHY DO SOME OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD SUPPORT COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM? WHY WOULD THEY SUPPORT WHAT APPEARS TO BE THE PATHWAY TO THEIR OWN DESTRUCTION?”
These are questions that still merit asking some 53 years later. Indeed, they are more pressing today since the phrase “some of the richest people in the world” could now be replaced with “nearly all the richest people in the world.”
Skousen partially answers the question on the very next page, quoting a former member of the National Committee of the U.S. Communist Party saying “I think the Communist conspiracy is merely a branch of a much bigger conspiracy!” The larger conspiracy is “a small but powerful control group behind the scenes.”
Okay, so what motivates this “small but powerful control group”? Later, he explains that this group’s “leaders became convinced that they had come upon a fantastically great idea: How to take over and control the resources of the world for the good of humanity.” That idea, a kind of naïve utopianism based on Plato’s Republic, was taught by John Ruskin to Cecil Rhodes and other members of Britain’s upper class at Oxford University back in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Those disciples, in turn, were “so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out his ideas.”
Today, we call that idea the New World Order, Agenda 2030, the Great Reset, or Our Common Agenda.
This elite financed (and still finances) socialist and communist organizations around the world, enabling them to infiltrate governments and other institutions in part to bring about the social, economic, and political changes needed to achieve the New World Order and also in part to exert control over them in order to ensure that the elites and their heirs remain safe, rich, and firmly in control. You see, this isn’t all being done out of altruism or idealism.
According to Skousen, “Dr. Quigley bluntly confesses that the International Bankers who had set out to remake the world were perfectly confident that they could use their money to acquire the cooperation and eventual control of the Communist-Socialist conspiratorial groups.”
“The master-planners,” Skousen writes, “have attempted to control the global conspiratorial groups by feeding them vast quantities of money for their revolutionary work and then financing their opposition if they seemed to be getting out of control.” In this way, the opposition too became controlled by the elites.
Today we can ask, Who was acquiring control of whom? For decades, the socialists and communists happily took the elite’s money, as they continue to do today, and use some part of it to brainwash the public and the elite’s sons and daughters into embracing their demented revolutionary dreams. We are now five or six generations deep into that descent and the “master planners” have become the tools and the public is unable to discern the truth.
Near the end of his book, Skousen describes the “current strategy of the Establishment” as being “to create revolution, violence and extremely serious social dislocation at the bottom while creating an ever-increasing pressure at the top for monolithic power by demanding that the executive branch of the Federal government be given massive power to ‘solve’ all these problems.”
Who can read that line without being reminded of the global warming scam, Covid lockdowns, and the Black Lives Matter riots? In all three cases, government caused “serious social dislocation” and then acquired massive new powers to address them. The elite’s playbook hasn’t changed in 50 years!
In recent years, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has unabashedly presented itself to the world as the public face of a globalist elite that almost exactly fits Skousen’s description. Its influence on world affairs is not seriously disputed by anyone, nor its devotion to the socialist-communist cause.
Competing for top billing with WEF are the United Nations, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the still-meeting Bilderberg Group, and enormous foundations such as Ford, MacArthur, Gates, and Bloomberg. All of them openly fund socialist and communist organizations and (along with communist regimes around the world) financed their now-completed “march through the institutions.”
So if you wonder, as Skousen wondered 53 years ago, how so many socialists and communists could get important jobs at the highest levels in the U.S. government, and why so many policy decisions seem to benefit an already magnificently wealthy elite rather than the general public, now you know. It isn’t that socialists and communists have won policy debates or that such policy decisions are the best ones that can be made given all the facts.
Knowing who really is orchestrating world events behind the scenes may prompt you to spend less time studying the relative merits of free-market versus socialist policy prescriptions or debunking the fake science that the left often tosses in to make it appear to be an authentic debate. Hint: The left already knows its “science” is fake, which is why they don’t bother amending or updating it when it has been disproven. They simply label and demonize anyone who disagrees with them.
You may now want to spend more time dislodging socialists and communists from the positions they hold in government (elected or appointed positions) or other institutions that matter such as foundations, school boards, university faculties, your local YMCA, and even churches and synagogues.
Skousen: “Establishment henchmen should all be replaced by men and women who are totally committed to restoring the American society to its traditional position provided within the framework of the American Constitution, as visualized by the founding fathers.”
Run for office or apply for positions, and urge people who value freedom who have better qualifications than yours to do the same and give them as much support as you can.
A famous line during the Reagan administration was “personnel is policy.” Putting the right people into positions of authority is more important than winning debates. I wish I had learned that 30 years ago. I would have barked up a different tree if I had.
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(Inexpensive paperback copies of the book may be ordered from https://skousen2000.myshopify.com. For some reason, hardcover copies are ridiculously expensive online.)