The Progressive-Left’s American Fifth Column is most often epitomized by the militant, bullhorn toting activist who, when not examined thoroughly, seems to be advocating for one “civil right” or another. We see them at the pro-illegal immigration protests, the anti-gun protests, the anti-war protests, anywhere a group of people can lay blame at the feet of government and especially the Bush Administration. But the American Fifth Column’s tentacles spread much wider and delve much deeper into our history and our society and recent events illustrate this as fact, rather than fiction.

The American Fifth Column is born out of Socialist/Communist ideology where the citizenry grows dependent on the government while the government increasingly legislates itself more control over the people.

In the perfect Fifth Column world, everyone is equal and possesses an artificially elevated sense of self-worth, the competitive spirit is equalized through taxes and legislated oversight of private business and societal boundaries – including boundaries in speech and action – are enforced through a shadow set of laws known as political correctness, a set of laws that undermine the authority of the Constitution.

The American Fifth Column is embodied by the politically correct multicultural one-world movement and encompasses all of the Progressive-Left buzz word initiatives, such as “diversity,” “public good,” “it takes a village,” “global village” and so on.

Through the artificial equalization of our society the Fifth Column strives to achieve the Balkanization of the United States through the celebration of diversity while inducing the surrender of individual choice within those Balkanized communities to governmental entities; divide and conquer.

When successful, the efforts of the Progressive-Left’s American Fifth Column achieve the neutering of the American spirit, the end of our celebrated melting pot where pride in individuality, whether ethnic, religious or social, gave way only to pride of country; e pluribus unim. It transforms pioneers into cogs in a machine for the “greater good” and feminizes our society, this feminization giving way to a society of defenseless victims who are completely reliant on government for their survival.

Recent events have driven me to opine about this societal cancer infiltrating our country under the guise of “progressive ideology,” among them the Virginia Tech shootings.

As the mainstream media reported how Cho Seung-Hui reloaded his two weapons multiple times during his murderous rampage one question kept emerging as the only question that needed to be asked in the nauseatingly repetitive after-the-fact analysis: While he was reloading, why didn’t someone pick up a chair and beat the hell out of him? 

I’ll admit that Hui’s first shooting of the day involved too few to invoke a mass response and I give credit to the resident assistant who came to the first female victim’s defense. But when he stormed the more populated classrooms of the lecture hall why didn’t someone stand-up to this cretin? Why was a septuagenarian holocaust and Soviet Bloc survivor the only one to stand up to Hui, effectively saying, “Not while I can do something about it!”

It can be argued that the lack of response from the majority of people in Hui’s gun sights were the products of over forty years of the Fifth Column’s artificially induced sense of self-importance and societal feminization. They had all been transformed into defenseless victims incapable of thinking about confrontation; incapable of understanding that there was an alternative to slaughter and that alternative was standing up to Hui the aggressor.

Imagine if after Hui started shooting his weapons that thirty people started throwing everything that they could find at him in unison while charging the sorry excuse for a human being. Logic mandates that Hui wouldn’t have fell so many victims because he wouldn’t have had free reign to wreck havoc. Evidence to this fact is in that all of the students in 76-year old Professor Liviu Librescu's classroom lived.

So, why did Hui’s victims and potential victims cower in fear as Hui methodically chose his victims for slaughter? Because our society has been conditioned through the propaganda of the Fifth Column to believe that violence and/or violent acts, in all cases, are unacceptable.

The American Fifth Column’s relentless and visionless opposition to the military efforts in Iraq stand as another glaring example.

I stand as one of the few voices who refuses to back down in the face of the Fifth Column’s relentless insistence that weapons of mass destruction was the onus for President Bush’s decision to assemble a coalition of willing nations to topple Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. This insistence, for the overwhelming part, is in error and it has been mischaracterized unmercifully in order to advance their politically correct, one-world efforts to equalize the United States on the world stage.

Ingenuous people will admit that after being reminded of the reasons given for action in Iraq – Saddam Hussein’s genocide of his own people and his blatant violation of the cease-fire agreement that allowed him to live at the end of the Gulf War – it would have been unthinkable to have allowed this madman to go unchallenged.

Yet, the American Fifth Column denounces the Bush Administration, condemns the military actions taking place on behalf of and authorized by a freely elected Iraqi government and insists on arguing the least tangible of all the points given for military intervention in Iraq, WMD, even though regime change in Iraq was mandated by Congress as US policy under the Clinton Administration.

Question for the Progressive-Left Fifth Column: When did genocide become acceptable to you?

Perhaps the most disturbing avenue the Fifth Column has cultivated is within our education system. From grade school through college, the education establishment, bolstered by the political activists and social engineers of the agenda-driven National Education Association, has the government mandated opportunity to poison the minds of our children, to brainwash our country’s youth.

Nary a day goes by when there isn’t a story espousing the political indoctrination by the likes of a Ward Churchill or a Jay Bennish, “teachers” – and I use the word loosely – who impose their political beliefs on their students while usurping the parental birthright to bequeath familial core values to their children.

School systems lorded over by busy-body Progressive-Leftists increasingly employ text books that rewrite history at our nation’s expense. Parents are kept from attaining full access to programs mandated by our schools that promote questionable adult content in the form of what is termed sex education under the heading of “diversity” and “cultural awareness.” And some public school systems are promoting the “understanding” of Islam by forcing students to become “Muslim for a day,” in direct contradiction of the Progressive-Left’s belief in separation of church and state.

As the Fifth Column Progressive-Leftists make inroads into our society, our education system and our state and federal governments, the overwhelming majority of Conservative lawmakers can’t find their spines long enough to demand action against elected officials who have certainly become nothing less than enemies of the State.

Not one Conservative lawmaker – in leadership or otherwise – has called for investigations into whether or not treason charges should be brought against or at least resignations be extracted from:

▪ House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: For her non-authorized and unconstitutional contact with the leader of a State sponsor of terrorism in a time of war in direct violation of the Logan Act. And for then declaring that she was “too busy” to meet with US General David Petraeus when he came to Washington to brief Congress on the current situation on the ground in Iraq.

▪ House Whip Steny Hoyer: For his contact with leadership of the terrorist organization The Muslim Brotherhood, a radical group who actively works to promote the creation of a global Islamic Caliphate as it aids and abets terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas, among others.

▪ Representative John Murtha for blatantly lying to the American people about not receiving a briefing from General Petraeus when Murtha received a personal briefing via telephone from the General for almost 30 minutes

▪ Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid: For his declaration “The war is lost,” a statement that most certainly aided and abetted the propaganda campaign of terrorist organizations with which the United States is currently at war.

While the Fifth Column chalks up victory after victory, inching further and further toward controlling not only the House and Senate but the White House and Supreme Court as well, Conservative lawmakers can’t even find the outrage to charge treason and demand resignations when elected Fifth Columnists are successfully aiding our enemy, steering our country into the abyss of military defeat and toward the human indignity that is Socialism.

But perhaps the most blame for the mess we’re in lies with the American people, specifically the Conservatives among us. While the insanity of the third party route and the casting of protest votes is incredibly clear to those who understand the threat of the Fifth Column, those pale in comparison to the most damaging shortcomings of the Conservative movement: personal inaction and abdication of responsibility.

Today’s Conservatives – especially today’s Republican Party (and there is a difference) – are very good at talking the talk but they are incredibly bad at walking the walk. While they extol the greatness of Ronald Reagan they repeatedly violate Reagan’s Rule not to air party problems in public so that the opposition can benefit from that knowledge.

So too are they delinquent in actually practicing what they preach.

How many of you have taken pen to paper and written a soldier serving in Iraq?

How many have sent a care package to afford one of them a little piece of home?

How many of you have actually written to your elected officials expressing your dismay or congratulating them on a job well done?

How many of you have advanced financial support – be it $1 or $1,000 – to the new media outlets that you patronize and who have without fail carried the water to the elephant while the mainstream media has served its big money special interest donors in the defeat of America?

How many of you have given of yourselves to promote the fact-based education of those around you so that our country would be a more educated and thus a better place to live?

What have you done to make sure there is an American Heritage to pass on to your children and your children’s children?

The time is shortly after 9:28am ET. The date is September 11, 2001. You are on-board Flight 93 and the al Qaeda hijackers have just made their move to commandeer the aircraft. After a few cell phone calls you come to understand that the World Trade Center is for all practical purposes gone and that the Pentagon has been attacked, all through the use of suicide missions that piloted aircraft as weapons into their targets.

Question: Do you have the courage, do you have the conviction, to you have what it takes to charge the cockpit, to confront the hijackers, knowing full well that you, in all probability, are going to die? Or are you one of the many who cowered in the back of the plane waiting to be slaughtered.

Hint: If you answered in the negative to any of the above questions, get to the back of the plane. Some of us have real work to do in order to save this country.

Frank Salvato is the managing editor for The New Media Journal. He serves at the Executive Director of the Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His pieces are regularly featured in over 100 publications both nationally and internationally. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor. He hosts The New Media Journal on BlogTalk Radio and is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network and The Captain’s America on WWPR AM1490 in the Tampa Bay area, as well as an occasional guest on The Bruce Elliott Show on WBAL AM1090 in Baltimore and numerous radio shows coast to coast. His organization, Basics Project, is partnered in producing the first-ever national symposium series on the threat of radical Islamist terrorism. His pieces have been recognized by the House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements. He can be contacted at newmediajournal@comcast.net.