As Adam Smith, the Godfather of capitalism, once said, there’s a “great deal of ruin in a nation.” That’s doubly true when you’re talking about a nation like America, the world’s last remaining superpower. How do you destroy a country with a powerful economy, a strong military, and a moral and decent people?

It has to be a long, slow process that moves subtly on many simultaneous fronts. If you become too bold, too fast, people will catch onto what you’re doing and even many of your biggest supporters will be forced to distance themselves from you….well, at least until you get a little further down the slippery slope.

To begin with, as conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart once said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” If you want to change a people for the worse, you have to start by undermining their values. This happens by slowly, yet surely taking over their institutions. Control Hollywood and the music industry and you can portray duty, honor and character as old timey concepts that no longer matter. You can also paint the most successful Americans as bad guys, the military as mind-numbed robots and decent Christians as hypocrites who want to ruin everyone’s good time.

More importantly, once you have actors and musicians on your side, there is practically no limit to the number of ways you can shape the culture for the worse. You can promote drug use and promiscuous sex. You can encourage men to feminize and women to be more masculine. Most importantly, you can portray your opponents who want to save what’s great about America as desperately unhip.

This reinforces the messages young Americans, who care desperately about being popular, are getting from their schools. Once you control Hollywood, music and the schools, you have a direct pipeline to the brains of the young Americans who will one day run the country. So, what do you teach them? It would be best if you could entirely get away from teaching them reading, writing, arithmetic and history, but as of yet, other than in a few inner city schools (see Detroit for a perfect example), that is not yet possible. So, what you do in the interim is distort their history. Don’t teach them the nuances of the Constitution; teach them the flaws of the men who made it. Vilify capitalism and Christianity. Look for every opportunity to move from giving children hard facts to teaching them pabulum about diversity and being nice to other people as opposed to having any sort of moral standards. With enough work, you can turn them into ignorant, entitled creampuffs who need “safe spaces” and warnings about “trigger words” to even make it through a day in a coddled university environment.

Once you’ve worked your magic on the populace, then you can start making moves in the political sector. The first is to promote judges who believe in a “living Constitution,” which is functionally no different than not having a Constitution at all. This allows arrogant judges to override the people in order to put foolish policies into action, but more importantly, it allows the unlimited expansion of government. The bigger government becomes, the less capable it seems of doing ANYTHING WELL despite its swelling cost. Once you have a government that’s almost universally considered to be incompetent despite spending so much money that it jeopardizes your nation’s future, your nation is on the road to ruin.

The key to keeping it on that road is capturing a political party that consistently appeals to people’s worst natures. You need a party committed to turning black Americans against white, women against men, gays against straights. You need a party committed to rewarding poverty, bringing in unlimited numbers of poor, uneducated immigrants and defending the unions that make America’s public school system mediocre. A political party that promises to rob Peter to pay Paul, will build a large, corrupt base of takers who will support it to get their share of those ill-gotten gains. No nation ever benefitted from having a large and growing class of parasites leeching off the most productive citizens and not even a nation as rich as America can bear it for long.

The thing that ties all of this together is a corrupt media that can largely control what news the population sees and focuses on. A media that is willing to lie in order to defame those trying to save a nation is useful, but not even necessary. All that really needs to be done is to focus the people on trivia, celebrities and the flaws of those who mean well while the great crimes of the most corrupt are ignored or treated as trivial. When the people are obsessed with minutiae while the country is coming apart at the seams, the media has done their job well.

After this sort of interconnected system is built, the odds shift is in favor of destroying a nation because as Machiavelli once wrote, “And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning a disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been treated or recognized at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure. The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state (which is a gift given only to a prudent ruler), they can be cured quickly; but when they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure.”

Once the system becomes self-sustaining as young Americans are no longer taught what made their nation successful, become obsessed with their feelings, come to believe that character doesn’t matter and buy into the destructive notions they see and hear every day on the big screen, on radio and in the papers, the disease that afflicts America will become so far advanced that it may never be cured.