Former Presidential candidate and Reform Party founder Ross Perot broke his self-imposed public retirement to make a bold warning: America could be taken over.

Perot was the last man to make a serious independent run for President. That was back in 1992. He withdrew from the race after he and his family had received serious threats against their lives. By the time he had gathered himself enough to reenter the race, all of his momentum was lost and Republican hacks like Rush Limbaugh had a heyday making sport of him. But the things Perot tried to warn us about back then have all come to pass. The economic malaise that currently envelopes this country could have been averted had Presidents and Congresses from both major parties over the past two decades had the sagacity and courage to heed Ross Perot and Ron Paul’s warnings. In fact, looking back, Bill Clinton looks like a fiscal saint compared to fiscal sinners G.W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Yahoo! News covers the story:

“Former presidential contender and billionaire Ross Perot is worried that America is a sitting duck for an unnamed foreign invader. In an interview for his new autobiography, Perot said the nation’s weak economy has left us open for a hostile takeover–and neither presidential candidate is the man to save the country.

“Citing an impending fiscal cliff, Perot warned of disaster. ‘If we are that weak, just think of who wants to come here first and take us over,’ the former CEO of info-tech company Perot Systems told USA Today on Monday.

“‘The last thing I ever want to see is our country taken over because we’re so financially weak, we can’t do anything,’ Perot says.

“When asked for his take on the presidential race, Perot added, ‘Nobody that’s running really talks about it, about what we have to do and why we have to do it. They would prefer not to have it discussed.’”

See the report here.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the American people do not truly understand the danger they are in. The national news media is mostly about NOT reporting what’s going on. The conspiracy of silence by the three major network news shows and the cable news shows is so overwhelmingly successful, the average American citizen truly doesn’t realize how dangerously close our country is to utter destruction–either by an economic collapse or by a nuclear war, or both. And all the two major parties can do is cast all the blame on each other, while the truth of the matter is BOTH major parties in Washington, D.C., are equally culpable for the jeopardous condition in which America now finds herself.

And Ross Perot is right: neither Obama nor Romney have the guts to even discuss (much less work to fix) the real causes of America’s fiscal woes.

Perot is also correct in his observation that America could be “taken over” by a foreign power. While the Bush and Obama administrations were beating the war drums for aggression against Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and God only knows who else in the Middle East, they have turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the clear and present danger posed by China and Russia. The fact that China and Russia are salivating over nuclear war with the United States seems totally lost to the State Department, CIA, NSA, DHS, the mainstream media, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and 95% of the American people.

Allow me to say at this point that if you live within a couple hundred miles to the east of a major nuclear target area, I would be making plans to relocate NOW. But you do what you want. That’s just what I would do. And in case you do not know where the major nuclear target sites are located in the United States, I highly encourage you to order Joel Skousen’ masterpiece: Strategic Relocation. Learn about it here.

Joel believes that China and Russia will not launch their nuclear attack against us for another ten years or so, but when it happens, it will be the catalyst for both a financial collapse and the rise of a totalitarian government. This leads to my question. Are we going to be taken over (as Mr. Perot is worried about), or are we already being taken over? Is our threat Beijing and Moscow or Washington, D.C.?

Without a doubt, the threat posed by Russia and China is very, very real (unlike the pseudo-threat posed by Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.). In fact, Russian and China have been preparing their countries’ civil defense and fallout shelters for years. The only such shelters that are being constructed in the United States, however, are those the federal government is building for the power-elite. And that is being done virtually invisibly.

But even short of a nuclear attack from Russia and China, is not the America that we knew, the America that was governed by a constitution, the America that believed in the principles of federalism and limited government, the America that regarded the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights as sacrosanct, the America that believed in paying its bills, the America that had an intrinsic fear of God within it, ALREADY being taken over?

Virtually every principle upon which America was founded and that guided this nation for over 200 years is being thoroughly expunged. Every one of them! My fear is that by the time a foreign power decides to push the button, the America that will be destroyed will only be a museum of what this country once was. The real America is being destroyed NOW–not by a foreign power, but from within!

As an example, try to wrap your brain around this report:

“Close to half of Americans say they are in favour of police departments deploying surveillance drones domestically.

“According to a survey conducted by The Associated Press and The National Constitution Center, 44 percent support the idea of police using unmanned aerial vehicles to track suspects and carry out investigations.

“Only 36 percent said that they ‘strongly oppose’ or ‘somewhat oppose’ police use of drones, according to the survey.

“The poll also found that only one third of Americans say they are significantly concerned about their privacy being eroded by the adoption of drones by police forces throughout the country.

“Thirty-five percent of respondents said they were ‘extremely concerned’ or ‘very concerned’ when asked if they believed that police departments’ use of drones for surveillance would impact their privacy.

“Almost exactly the same number, 36 percent, noted that they were ‘not too concerned’ or ‘not concerned at all’, while twenty-four percent were neutral on the issue, saying they were only ‘somewhat concerned’ about a potential loss of privacy.

“David Eisner, president and CEO of the constitution center in Philadelphia, told the AP that he was somewhat baffled by the response to the poll:

“‘I had assumed that the idea that American police would be using the same technology that our military is using in Afghanistan would garner an almost hysterical response,’ Eisner said. Support for drone use ‘shows that people are feeling less physically secure than they’d like to because they are willing to accept fairly extreme police action to improve that security.’”

See the report  here.

So, how could half of the American people be utterly unconcerned or even enthusiastic about this country being turned into a giant surveillance society? Are they so ignorant of history as to not realize that the most glaring observation of every totalitarian regime in modern–or even not so modern–memory was always the implementation of a massive surveillance network within the country? It seems that there is virtually no intrusion into our personal lives and liberties so egregious that the American people will not support it, if it is presented as a way of making them more “secure.”

Today, the vast majority of the American people don’t think twice about the government tracking them and listening to them through their cell phones, spying on their financial transactions, recording their phone conversations, reading their emails, scanning the data on their computers, setting up ubiquitous checkpoints on highways, and now sending drones over their homes and neighborhoods–drones that are currently being used to kill mostly innocent men, women, and children in the Middle East. Yes, you read it right: mostly innocent men, women, and children.

Several credible reports that I have read surmise that for every real “terrorist” that our drones kill in Pakistan and elsewhere, at least fifty innocent civilians are killed. Pray tell, if the people in our government are that calloused and coldhearted to the routine killing of innocent people in other countries, why would one think that they would suddenly develop a soul should they be given the order to kill innocent men, women, and children in this country?

Pray tell, how has this happened? How has it happened that the most courageous defenders of liberty in the world (the American people) have become complacent condoners of tyranny? I place the bulk of the blame on America’s pastors and preachers. For decades, they have told and retold their congregants to “trust the government,” “submit to the government,” “obey the government,” “the government is good,” “the government is of God,” etc. They have bastardized Romans 13 and helped turn free men and women into sheepish slaves of the state.

While Ross Perot worries about America’s takeover from foreign entities, I worry that Americans are putting the noose around their own necks.

Dr. Chuck Baldwin left the Crossroad Baptist Church in Pensacola, Florida to move to Montana. He hosts a weekly radio show. His website is here