Yes, we are at war. Very definitely, we have been at war. It's an economic war, it's a war of

subversion. It's a war of espionage. It's a war of ideas, and it's a war of terrorism and infiltration.

Is it as serious of war as it would be if there was an exchange of nuclear weapons?

No, it's the type of war we are in is far more sophisticated than an exchange of

gunfire or nuclear weapons. Because it's a war of attacked upon institutions, it's a war of

an attack upon every segment of a society. It is total war.

That was Larry McDonald, the Democratic Congressman from Georgia back in 1982 speaking about the

menace to America from communist subversives and their allies inside the

US government a threat so grave he called it total war.

McDonald is barely remembered today.

He died the next year on a Korean airline flight that was shot down by the Soviets

when it mistakenly crossed into Russian territory.

But the views of McDonald, who served as national chairman of the John Birch Society,

eerily anticipated some of those held by the Q-Anon movement currently plaguing the American political dialogue.

Like the Q-Anon cultists, McDonald saw conspiracies everywhere.

Like Q-Anon, he saw shady and disloyal

operatives embedded inside the country's intelligence and law enforcement

agencies. And like Q, the anonymous top secret insider supposedly seeking to reveal this grave plot against America,

McDonald nearly 40 years ago vowed to expose the vast conspiracy, even creating his own private intelligence

service to do so.

We'll talk to Zach Dorfman of the Aspen Institute, who wrote a groundbreaking article about Larry McDonald and the

striking parallels to our current conspiratorial culture on this special

...