An Apology to a Dead Friend
What happens to democracy and the rule of law when the alarmists turn out to be right?
Death comes for us all eventually. We’re fortunate to live in WEIRDistan,* at a time and place where our demise usually can be put off until the psalmist’s three score and ten, if not longer. Exceptions when people die younger, even in middle age – fifty being the new thirty and all that – are viewed as unique tragedies, something the rest of us prefer not to dwell upon, since they remind us of our own eventual end.
Yet, such exceptions happen. My own father never made it to fifty. Neither did a friend of mine, and he’s the topic of this essay. This is the beginning of Orthodox Holy Week, a good time to remember the dead, in the hope of the resurrection, while pondering one’s own mortality. Current events make this difficult discussion even more necessary.
American campuses in recent weeks have been riven by increasingly hot-tempered protests over the Gaza war. Across the country, angry young activists have embraced the Palestinian cause with gusto, advocating the destruction of Israel and, at least implicitly, the genocide of the Jews living there – and perhaps everywhere. Some say that explicitly. One Columbia University protest leader got itself – I’m not sure of the pronouns here – expelled in response to public backlash when it came to light that the student had boastfully stated that “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” adding: “I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.” “Those people” here being “Zionists and white supremacists,” which given expansive Woke definitions of those terms, means the death of most Jews and whites in America, altogether something like half the country. This self-proclaimed “black and queer” activist openly preached hatred of “white people” for years, so it’s abundantly clear that Columbia had no problem with such genocidal rhetoric. The university only acted because people off campus noticed such Holocaust-do-over talk.
Neither is such violently crazy hate speech, including anti-Semitism that might make Julius Streicher blush, an outlier anymore. We are experiencing the culmination of decades of the radical Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Our universities, especially elite ones, have been captured by nihilistic radicals advocating for something which can be fairly termed Racial Communism. Old-school liberals who sincerely believed in free speech, though not always enough to actually defend it when challenged from the Left, have retired from the faculty, being replaced by professors and administrators who either agree with the Woke radicals or are too afraid to ask them to tone down their kill-the-Jews rhetoric.
In fairness to those young hotheads, many of whom display obvious signs of mental illness, they’ve been raised in a coddled environment where any political discussion they disapprove of can be immediately silenced by claiming “words are violence,” which make them feel “unsafe,” yet their own calls for actually murdering people constitute protected, indeed progressive, speech. This is merely the logic of the “progressive stack” taken to its genocidal conclusion.
Inspired by Black Lives Matters and their ilk, young radicals for years have called for eliminating “white supremacy” as well as the ubiquitous “patriarchy,” and “capitalists,” plus any other group they deem unworthy of life, while experiencing no pushback whatsoever on campus. Therefore, it must be confusing to them to discover that calling for another Holocaust is different. After all, if it’s fine to advocate the murder of “white supremacists” – which means any whites who are not enthusiasts of the full Racial Communism program – why is a certain kind of white people, namely Jews, not a fair target? To make this even weirder, quite a few campus Jews were full-throated advocates of BLM and the Woke agenda – right until they realized that, thanks to HAMAS and the Gaza war, they’re now the radical Left’s preferred target.
Many liberals feel a pressing need to make the current crisis seem not as dreadful as it really is. I understand that need, since a lot of this political disaster is on them. The Woke don’t think about conservatives; they seldom know anybody to the right of Bernie Sanders. The Left took over our campuses decades ago, and such conservatives as there were on the faculty, never very many, are long gone. Liberals failed to defend their own Enlightenment principles of free speech and free ideas. They surrendered to Woke radicals out of a ubiquitous fear of being tarred as “racist” or “transphobic.” As the French socialist patriot Charles Péguy prophetically put it over a century ago: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of appearing insufficiently progressive.”
The current liberal cope encompasses the claim that few students are participating in the campus tumult. This is undeniably true, and always has been. Revolutionaries are definitionally a minority vanguard. Even at the height of the last wave of American campus radicalism, over the Vietnam war and associated trendy causes in the late 1960s, the vast majority of students were laying low, just going to class and hoping to get a job after graduation, rather than bombing ROTC buildings and burning draft records. The disconcerting truth is that even a small number of violent radicals can cause massive mayhem. Sometimes all it takes to take over a whole country is one sealed train loaded with maniacs on a mission.
The threat here isn’t about numbers, rather the cowardice of the establishment. President Joe Biden and his party have demonstrated no ability to tamp down the inflammatory radicalism on their own Left flank. This is hardly helped by the reality that Democrats have allowed extremists, many of them belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, to burrow into the heart of their party. Indeed, to Zoomers, those DSA-flavored radicals are the face and future of the Democrats, and many of them, including Congressmembers, are openly sympathetic to HAMAS. It bears reminding that HAMAS has been deemed a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department since the FTO list was created in 1997; supporting them is morally obscene, and can be illegal, not that Biden’s Justice Department seems to care.
The Democrats’ unwise choice to host their national convention in Chicago this August invites emulation of their infamous 1968 Chicago convention, when campus-driven radicalism delivered scenes of mayhem on city streets that helped put Richard Nixon in the White House. Will 2024 prove to be a repeat of 1968, to the benefit of Donald Trump and Republicans? That’s certainly possible, as is the alarming prospect of a wave of left-wing terrorism, just as followed the domestic tumult of 1968. One difference, however, is that mainstream Democrats of the Cold War era, or at least the first half, understood that they had a radicalism problem on their left flank: Communists and their fellow-travelers were correctly viewed as subversives and enemies, not partners, by the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. Instead, Democrats in recent years have opted for a “no enemies to the Left” strategy which acquiesced in entryism by radicals, leading straight to the turmoil of today.
Few are the nationally prominent Democrats daring to denounce campus terrorism chic. An unanticipated outlier is freshman Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who since the Oct. 7 HAMAS attack on Israel has repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to our ally while condemning terrorism unambiguously. His health crisis of 2022, including a stroke that nearly killed him, produced a rejuvenated Fetterman who’s not been shy about mocking the Woke Left and its pretentions. Typical was a humorous Fetterman tweet this weekend, lampooning a Columbia University pro-Palestinian encampment with the statement: “Portlandia for Hamas.”
There’s indeed more than a whiff of Portlandia surrounding our campus jihadists. Protesters include the requisite contingent of pink-haired, face-pierced youths of indeterminate gender ranting in favor of HAMAS without demonstrating the slightest understanding of what that group represents. The unironic existence of “Queers for Palestine” is emblematic, since HAMAS, like Islamists everywhere, takes an exceptionally dim view of LGBTQ-anything, and has been known to execute gays for fun. Many of the privileged American college kids shouting “From the river to be sea, Palestine will be free” have no idea what they’re marching for.
It's therefore tempting to dismiss these campus outbursts as radical opera buffa, but that would be a mistake. However clueless the foot soldiers may be, the powers lurking behind this would-be revolution are well organized and funded. Campus encampments for Palestine across the country feature not just the same banal slogans, but the same brand-new tents and camping gear. Someone is orchestrating and paying for all this with impressive logistics. Early suspicion has fallen on cash-cows linked to George Soros, who has bankrolled so many leftist causes in recent decades. That’s surely true, but there’s more to it than that. Anybody seeking deeper answers regarding who’s pulling the strings here would make unsettling discoveries, fast. But that’s another story for another Top Secret Umbra newsletter.
What also stands out is how unlikely this Commie coalition looks from a distance. What, after all, do these disparate radicals – trustafarian Marxists (some of them Jews), radical queer activists, many flavors of BLM blacktivists, Woke fundamentalists of every variety, plus outright Islamists and their HAMAS-crushing fellow travelers – have in common? Nothing except hatred for America and the modern West. That, apparently, is sufficient. And it ought to alarm everyone who thinks the values of the Enlightenment West, flaws and all, are worth defending, because this strange revolution is sinking them for good if it’s not stopped, soon.
Watching all this uncanny drama unfold with equal parts horror and fascination, I desperately wanted to call up an old friend who warned me and many others of exactly this “diverse” anti-Western revolt coming to pass, many years ago. Unfortunately, that’s impossible, because he’s dead.
His name was Rich Higgins and he passed in early 2022, following a brave health battle, at the age of just forty-seven. He left behind a widow and four children, two of them very young. “One of a kind” is a hoary cliché but Rich was exactly that. Boston Irish from central casting, wee but fierce. He was very much a triple-decka kid from the Boston suburbs, though boasting an engineering degree from Tufts. He traveled in top circles in the Beltway national security arena yet you could never quite forget, especially if you have lived in and loved Boston like me, that with Rich you were dealing with an exceptionally intelligent and well-read Masshole.
After Tufts, Rich joined the Army, where he served with distinction as an EOD soldier, disarming IEDs in more than one hotspot. Rich was, above all else, a born warrior. An indomitable fighting spirit suffused everything he did. Sometimes perhaps too much. After the Army, Rich went to work in the bowels of the Pentagon in the hush-hush arena euphemistically termed “irregular warfare.” It was there, in the wilds of Northern Virginia, during Dubya’s rocky second term, that I encountered Rich and found a kindred spirit.
At the time, the Defense Department and the Intelligence Community were mired in our doomed wars of choice in the Greater Middle East. Big-picture thought about the generational fight we were in was discouraged: everything in the five-sided-funny-farm was about tactics – whack-a-mole, fundamentally. That dim-bulb approach was destined to lose, as it did, eventually. Rich saw the big picture, however, with alarming clarity, and he was impressed by my book Unholy Terror about the Bosnian war of 1992-1995. My insider’s take on that ugly conflict, based on my personal experiences, including as technical director of the National Security Agency’s Balkans Division, was ignored by the mainstream media and won me few friends inside the Beltway. I knew unsettling things that the public, including journalists and pundits, did not, and in that book I revealed as much as I could while honoring my lifetime IC non-disclosure agreements.
I was a whistleblower, but I wasn’t perceived as such, except by a brave few. Establishment folks inside the Beltway viewed me as a turncoat for spilling the beans about Washington’s dirty Balkan secrets, including President Bill Clinton’s de facto alliance with jihadists, including Al-Qa’ida and revolutionary Iran, in the years before 9/11. However, the professional spook-hating contingent, which has a big audience and theoretically loves whistleblowers, rejected me too, because I hold to the archaic belief that spies happen: they have always existed and always will.
Rich Higgins, in contrast, saw Unholy Terror for what it was, a one-of-a-kind exposé about how Islamists and Western lefties, with mainstream media help, conspired to hide the ugly truth about jihadists, their aims, and their crimes. This tracked perfectly with his ardent belief in Political Warfare, particularly that Radical Islam was more deeply entrenched in the West than anybody cared to admit, or even notice.
Moreover, Rich insisted that Islamism was making serious, if mostly clandestine, inroads into Western political life, including in the United States. Operating through fronts and cut-outs, the Muslim Brotherhood, the foundational Sunni extremism organization, over the last almost-century has moved from trying to overthrow the government in its native Egypt to attempting to do the same all over the world. Radical Islam was coming, and it sought to conquer.
With Rich’s secret outfit, I completed impressive amounts of intelligence collection and analysis about the Brotherhood and related Islamist fronts that were working to subvert the West, preeminently the United States, in collusion with myriad Western radicals, to the detriment of our liberty and safety. That work was classified, so I will say no more about it except that it was detailed and prescient.
Rich embraced darker views about all this than I did back then. He saw what was coming with clarity, whereas I held on to my belief that WEIRD institutions would resist radicalism longer than they in fact did. My optimism turned out to be wishful thinking. Rich saw the odd Woke-Jihadist alliance forming long before anyone else in Washington, DC, did. There were few Beltway voices of power willing to heed Rich’s warnings. His alarm-sounding was heresy as far as the Pentagon and the IC were concerned. A handful of Congressmembers were convinced by Rich’s arguments, yet they remained unwilling to say so outside a closed room.
Barack Obama’s two-term presidency placed Rich on the backburner with the Pentagon. In Rich’s eyes, Obama perfectly represented his concern. He rejected right-wing conspiracy thinking about Obama and faced the facts: this was a guy with affection for Islam, raised and educated in a privileged left-wing cocoon, who embraced the “decolonizing” ideology with gusto. Rich watched as the Obama administration allowed known Brotherhood operatives access to power, even the White House. Nobody seemed to care. Certainly, the FBI didn’t, because they relied on the same Brotherhood people as “experts” on Islam.
In 2016, Rich saw his opportunity with Donald Trump as the salve to all this mounting mess. I was considerably more skeptical. While Rich viewed Trump as the patriotic hero who would set things right, I assessed The Donald’s long public career and determined that we were dealing with a charlatan, a carnival-barker who makes extravagant promises then delivers on few if any of them. To say nothing of Trump’s weird, unsettling ties to Moscow. However, Rich needed to believe, thus he went full MAGA, early.
Rich was convinced that Trump saw the sinister forces that he saw, and MAGA would turn the ship around before it was too late. I detected none of that and I told Rich so. Moreover, I warned him not to take Trump at his word on anything. All relationships for Trump are transactional, he has no principles, so if you haven’t done something for Don lately, forget it. Rich was confident that a top job on the National Security Council awaited him in a Trump presidency, a powerful position from which he could get the national security bureaucracy to take Political Warfare seriously, at last.
I was wrong about the Woke-Jihadist threat whereas Rich was right. I, however, nailed Trump. Regrettably, our division over Trump took a toll on our friendship. We never had a split, exactly, but Rich viewed me as suspect for being a MAGA skeptic. Our discussions gradually dwindled.
Rich did get a job on Trump’s NSC, but it wasn’t the power-gig he expected. From the start of the Trump administration, Rich waged an internal struggle to get the White House to heed his warnings about the rising Woke-Jihadist threat. His effort never got very far. A combination of Obama hold-overs and Trump staffers who were considerably less MAGA than Rich was ensured that his crusade stalled. In particular, NSC boss H.R. McMaster, a retired Army three-star general, had no time for Rich’s talking points.
Here Rich’s personality got the better of him. For someone who so presciently understood the power of Narrative over political facts, Rich nevertheless felt that if he could just get people to listen, they could be converted. Rich’s warrior spirit didn’t quit and that’s what undid him in Washington. In May 2017, he penned a barn-burning seven-page memo he titled “POTUS and Political Warfare.” This was vintage Rich, a terse warning that the Deep State was working to undermine Trump’s presidency, in alliance with Woke-Jihadist cadres that were funded by leftist NGOs. In Rich’s vivid telling, intelligence agencies were in cahoots with the radical Left including Antifa and the professoriate, boosted by the mainstream media, in alliance with Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood and its fronts.
Balanced analysis, this was not. It was Rich’s shot across the bow to get the Oval Office’s attention. It failed. There’s no indication that President Trump ever saw the memo. But NSC higher-ups did. When the memo came to light in the summer of 2017 under murky circumstances, the media reported it with glee, dismissing it as far-Right crackpottery. Inexplicably, Rich failed to classify his memo, as is standard on the NSC, meaning it could be leaked by his enemies without consequence. Which is exactly what happened.
Rich was dismissed by the MSM as a kook, a deranged conspiracy theorist. He was booted from the NSC immediately, his long government career terminated. MAGA efforts to get Rich back into the Pentagon in the last months of Trump’s presidency went nowhere. He maintained his MAGA faith to the end, never blaming Trump for his fate. In Rich’s account, the sinister forces arrayed against MAGA, seeking to nefariously unseat President Trump, merely took out Rich first.
Not long thereafter, Rich fell ill and was no longer able to contribute regularly to his life’s work, naming the enemies of America and the West (and Donald Trump). In hindsight, Rich was overheated about the forces arrayed against MAGA, but he was alarmingly prescient about the power of the militant Left and its odd alliance of racial and sexual activists plus Islamists, funded by shadowy Marxistoid mega-donors. Rich predicted exactly what is playing out on America’s campuses right now. Neither is it likely to remain confined to campuses. Political Warfare is the correct term for this threat.
I wish I could tell him how right he was. Perhaps someday we’ll meet again, my friend. Until then, rest in peace, Rich. As my church puts it: Vičnaja pamjat’! Eternal Memory!
P.S. The Richard Higgins Memorial Fund is still active on GoFundMe, if any readers are so inclined.
*Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, per the research.