“I don’t know what happened to our culture…I don’t know when we began to celebrate bullies instead of looking out for people who care for other people. When did that happen?” — Former Pres. Barack Obama.

The call by Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) for a “Myanmar-style coup” in the U.S. at a QAnon meeting in Texas this week is only the latest evidence of the active coup efforts orchestrated by Russia’s Putin against the U.S.

Honestly, I didn’t expect the revelations and insights that have come to me personally by virtue of witnessing the Trump presidency in its totality and especially by its exclamation point, the January 6 sacking of the nation’s Capitol building by thousands of domestic terror cultists.

When the word, “cult,” gets bandied about, including by increasing numbers nowadays who recognize that the pro-Trump current in the GOP is now effectively one, there remains a great lack of information and appreciation for what “cults” actually are, and why putting that label on the Trump movement is apropos.

Trump as a bonafide Russian agent of influence is difficult to comprehend because he did, after all, fill the office of the U.S. presidency for four years with all of its seemingly patriotic trappings. But at no point did he, or does he now, operate without self-conscious knowledge of his role vis-a-vis Putin and the Russians.

Virginia and the nation are at a critical point of the pandemic recovery. With sound leadership and major investments in our country, President Biden is turning this around.

In the early 1970s, under the cover of a new “detente” with the Nixon administration, the Soviet KGB that is the Russian government today under Putin began a shift in how to penetrate and control the U.S. from within

Putin’s ongoing hands-on role in the cultivation and advancement of the QAnon and other radical right movements in the U.S. is not going away.

Somewhere in the late-1960s to early 1970s, the Soviet leadership and its KGB shifted its focus of covert operations in the U.S. from persuading the American public to prefer a government dedicated to socialist values to a much more cynical intervention based simply on weakening the nation’s existing governmental institutions and their democratic functioning.

But it is my humble opinion that was the Putin connection to QAnon and the siege of the U.S. Capitol confirmed and came to light in a demonstrable way, then the American public would be astonished, exposed to the deeper level of treachery involved in that event and all that led up to it.