At a moment when a motley crew of demonstrators, protesters, and violent urban thugs has repeatedly joined forces - not just to make known their unhappiness with the Donald Trump administration, but to bring chaos to American streets and to seek the destruction of our constitutional order - there is an urgent need to understand who is organizing, funding and leading these cabals. Their banners, placards and slogans provide incomplete answers. Indeed, it seems that many of the marchers themselves fail to understand who is pulling the strings that propel the seemingly disparate Muslim Brothers, Black Lives Matter operatives, radical feminists, anarchists and other hard leftists to coordinated confrontation with law enforcement and the rest of American society.

Unfortunately, our preparedness for confronting the array of such forces committed to the destruction of traditional Western values and civilization as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution has faltered badly in the years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. That is due, in no small measure, ironically to the successful influence operations waged against our national security leadership by adherents to the same ideology that animated the attacks of that fateful day: Islam's Sharia doctrine. As a result, that leadership has been rendered incapable of confronting these enemies by name, identifying accurately what impels them, let alone achieving a decisive victory over them and their ideology.

As Matthew Vadum persuasively documents in Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States, the jihadists' success in this regard is not entirely attributable to the seductiveness of their information and influence operations. They owe much to the decades-long march of cultural Marxism through the key pillars of American society: academia, faith communities, government (especially national security), law enforcement, and media.

After all, it was communist, leftist, and progressive operatives who successfully promoted the notion that the Judeo-Christian principles laid down by the Founding Fathers were, at best, outmoded and, at worst, a force for ill in the world. In this shared antipathy to the traditional religious values that inspired and nurtured Western civilization, Islam and the left found grounds to make common cause: They could set aside their own divergent ideologies and desired end states for the time being and join forces to bring down America.

The emergence of the contemporary Red-Green axis coincided with - and contributed to - the undoing of a counterintelligence mindset in official U.S. circles. Effectively neutralized was any appreciation of the threat posed by influence operations and, in particular, their perpetrators inside the United States. These dynamics contributed greatly to the collapse of our Intelligence Community's ability to protect against hostile propaganda, whether of the communist or taqiyya varieties, and subversive infiltration by their practitioners.

That vulnerability was made all the more ominous by the ties between Western leftists and jihadists who were recruited, trained and, in some cases at least, managed by the Soviet Union and its feared security service, the KGB. Over the years, we have learned much about such operations from declassified information like the Mitrokhin Archive and the Venona Papers. Defectors like Ion Pacepa from Romania's secret police and brilliant researchers like Diana West in American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nation's Character have illuminated how communist agents stoked the flames of Islamic terrorism and infiltrated deeply inside the ranks of the U.S. government.