When Charles Sasser was 12, his father sent him down to the county barn to stand in line for what he called "gimpy groceries" – government surplus commodities such as beans, cheese and powdered milk.

It was an exceedingly difficult year on the family farm; otherwise, the elder Sasser's pride and dignity would have prevented him from accepting charity. He was too proud to ask for government handouts, which was why he sent Charles in his place.

As young Charles stood in line with the other poor farmers at the county barn, one of the government workers handing out free food pushed him for some reason. Charles, who was a scrappy little kid, readied for a fight.

But the government worker only sneered, "Boy, if the government feeds you, it'll do what it damn well pleases."

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That was the best lesson Charles Sasser ever learned. He came to realize anyone who depends on government is ultimately a slave to government. He never accepted any government handouts after that.

Now, after nearly 40 years as a journalist and historian, Sasser recognizes the familiar cycle that many countries throughout history have gone through: from bondage to spiritual faith to great courage to liberty to abundance to complacency to apathy to dependency to bondage once again.

Charles Sasser's "Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing" is available now at the WND Superstore!

"If we look around right now, we look at our society, we're back on the dependency stage," Sasser said in an interview with "The Hagmann Report." "The next step is back to bondage, and you can see with the chaos that's occurring right now in our society that we're only one step away from tyranny."

Sasser, author of the brand-new book "Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing," fears it may be too late to revive the United States.

"When we have 47 percent of our people dependent in one form or another upon government largesse, then we have reached that dependency stage," he said. "You give people something, they don't want [anyone] to take it away."

In fact, ancient Rome had a massive welfare state, with more than 300,000 Romans on the rolls at various times. It was one of the factors that eventually collapsed that great empire.

Another contributing factor to Rome's collapse, according to some historians, was mass perversion among the population. When Sasser worked as an undercover journalist among the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, he witnessed a mixture of perversion and glorification of government dependency.

"On this one table, they were rolling marijuana cigarettes and passing them out," Sasser recalled. "The first night I'm there there was a rape, an assault, some guy urinating on a police car. I mean, it went on and on and on."

Everywhere he went, he saw signs and heard cries for free things – free education, free health care, free public transportation and the like. When Sasser would ask someone who was going to pay for all the freebies, he would invariably reply either "the rich" or "the government."

"We have President Barack Obama who comes out and commends these people as the future," Sasser recalled. "These are the future of the nation, they tell us. If they are the future, this is a scary future. And I believe it may be our future."

Sasser has taught at junior colleges for almost 40 years, and he has lately noticed the proliferation of "safe spaces" and students who get offended by almost everything.

"They're incapable of coping with reality," he said. "They're incapable of being independent. I'm firmly convinced of that now. It's a mob mentality, a collective mentality, a collective mentality that unless it's crushed, it will crush the rest of the nation."

To avoid the same fate as Rome, the U.S. needs to return to a spirit of individualism and start demanding that people be independent, according to Sasser. But the federal government is doing the opposite. Sasser revealed he once lived with a family of black sharecroppers in Mississippi. One day, the family patriarch remarked that things were changing and blacks were being told to blame "whitey" for the poor condition of their race.

This was during the period immediately after passage of President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" welfare legislation in the mid-1960s. Prior to that, Sasser pointed out, there was very little difference between white culture and black culture in terms of the unemployment rate, crime rate, fatherless rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate. But then came the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the War on Poverty, and things changed.

"You know what happened to the black culture?" Sasser asked. "They became dependent on government. First of all, we said, 'Well, you really don't need a father because you've got welfare. Fathers are irrelevant anymore, and you can eat, you don't have to work because you're poor, and primarily a lot of it is because you don't work that you've become poor.'

"Don't call me racist; I grew up in poverty, and I know how to work. So we had that, they became dependent. Next thing you know, we had the black population put back on the plantation in the ghettos. We put them back because government promised to take care of them from cradle to grave."

The same thing has happened to Native Americans, Sasser said. He witnessed it firsthand because he is one-quarter Creek and once lived on an Indian reservation. He saw sky-high rates of alcoholism, suicide and unemployment among his fellow Indians.

"We've destroyed those people," Sasser lamented. "What people fail to understand is skin color has nothing to do with any of this. What it is is we've taken groups and split them into groups and made some of them dependent on government and turned them against everyone else."

And government dependency paves the way for a complete government takeover, he noted. While communism is more likely to take hold in a nation such as in pre-industrial Russia, a post-industrial nation such as the present-day United States is more vulnerable to fascism, a system in which private ownership is conditioned on submission to the state.

If fascism comes to America, it will not come from white supremacists, according to Sasser. Rather, it will come from radical left-wing groups such as Antifa, which have the power of the media, wealthy financiers and many politicians behind them.

"I had the privilege of living through some of the best days in America, and now I'm unfortunate enough to live through the final, last days of America," Sasser said in conclusion.

"We will see the last days unless we can crush this whole idea of the collective. We are not collective; we are individuals. People can't seem to understand anymore that we are individuals, that we were the first nation in the world that declared that we were free and independent by virtue of God, and that built our entire nation on the idea of individual freedom."

Charles Sasser's "Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing" is available now at the WND Superstore!