This article, written by my senior editor at The New American, Bill Jasper, is quite extraordinary. It appeared online on Monday. It also appears in the print issue of The New American to be published on May 21. 

“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within,” the great Roman statesman Cicero opined before the Senate. That warning is as applicable today as it was 2,000 years ago.

In 1965, best-selling historical novelist Taylor Caldwell published her great work on Marcus Tullius Cicero, A Pillar of Iron. A central focus of her meticulously researched study was Cicero’s political combat with, and triumph over, the treasonous conspiracy led by Roman Senator Lucius Sergius Catilina, known in English as Catiline. While Rome’s wealthiest and ablest citizens timidly evaded their duties to defend the commonweal against the impending mortal danger, Cicero, the incomparable rhetoretician, aided by Cato the Younger, dauntlessly exposed and opposed the Catiline conspiracy, which had penetrated all levels of the government. Prominent senators and aristocrats in the conspiracy included Lentulus, Cethegus, Longinus, and Paetus.

“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious, but it cannot survive treason from within,” Caldwell records Cicero declaiming before the Senate, in A Pillar of Iron. “An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.”

Cicero called out Catiline and his prominent co-conspirators for precisely what they were: traitors, subversives, infectious corrupters, a “plague” — worse even than murderers. The traitor, said Cicero, “rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague.” (Emphasis added.)

A Catilinarian plague, of which Cicero warned, is now upon us! The conspiracy we face, however, is larger, more powerful, more sophisticated, more deadly, and more deeply laid than that faced by Cicero, Cato, and their fellow Romans. This conspiracy did not spring up overnight. It did not begin last year, in opposition to President Trump, although its virulent opposition to President Trump has made its existence and operations much more visibly obvious. No, the “Deep State” conspiracy of which we speak goes back many decades, long before the term “Deep State” was coined to signify the shadowy, self-perpetuating cabal that constitutes the permanent ruling class in the bowels of our government.

Taylor Caldwell was well aware of this conspiracy, which she described as “Force X” in a 1963 article by that title for American Opinion, the predecessor magazine of The New American. This was during the height of the Cold War, when Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro, and many other communist dictators were spreading hate, death, destruction, terror, and totalitarian misery across the entire planet. However, Caldwell recognized that, as with Catiline’s conspiracy in Cicero’s time, the strength of the communist conspiracy came largely from the secret assistance it could count on from highly placed individuals in American society and in the U.S. government, particularly in the large tax-exempt foundations, the news media, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. These and other critical instruments of governance and propaganda had been gradually taken over by the organized globalists, more commonly known in that era as “one-worlders,” advocates of world government, which they commonly refer to as their “new world order.” The organization that served as the chief front for the one-world coterie, and that effected many of its designs, was (and is) the Council on Foreign Relations, which Caldwell exposed in her 1972 novel Captains and the Kings under the fictional names of the Committee for Foreign Studies and the Scardo Society.

Over the past year, we have witnessed an incredible stream of Catilinarian traitors engaging in an ever more brazen and transparent conspiracy against the rule of law and our entire moral and constitutional order. The unprecedented attacks by the globalists’ minions heading our intelligence agencies against the elected president, Donald Trump, are breathtakingly audacious. Never before has this nation seen the heads of the Department of Justice, CIA, FBI, NSA, and other apparatuses of the “Force X” surveillance state engage in such open, blatant warfare against the nation they claim to serve. After being kicked out of their Deep State perches, John Brennan, James Clapper, and dozens of their “Intelligence Community” confederates have been rewarded with lucrative posts as “expert” commentators at CNN, NBC, CBS, and other controlled media platforms, from which they are continuing their treasonous attacks.

“In heaven’s name, men,” Cato appealed to his fellow Romans, “wake up while there is still time and lend a hand to defend the Republic. It is … our liberty and lives that are at stake.” Cato’s urgent appeal rings down through the ages to our present day. We dare not fail to respond.