Counting Down America's 30 Greatest Threats

It may shock some people that America is faced with dozens of massive threats against us. Others will think that a list of 30 is way too small.

From dependence on hostile supply chains to the ongoing border crisis, from the rising occult to the fall of personal meaning, and from foreign wars to the transhumanist temptation, America and her people are bombarded with challenges every day of our lives.

On today’s episode of the Wendy Bell Radio Program at 9am Pacific which I will be simulcasting on The JD Rucker Show, I will go through this list in far more detail.

Whether that’s a countdown to oblivion or a wake up call to action is up to those who watch and listen. It’s important to note that these are the greatest ideological threats. We are not including the institutions or organizations that commit the crimes because many of them, such as the Deep State or the Red-Green Alliance, actually operate across multiple threats.

We are also not addressing groups directly; it’s easy to just blame Democrats or Islamists, but again their challenges for America cross the spectrum. These are the ideas that threaten us. Anyone who tries to build such a list will come up with a different order, add some threats and lose others. But just about everyone in my audience will agree that we have a whole lot arrayed against us. These threats are in order of how I see them...

We begin where most of the other problems on this list are manufactured. American K-12 schools and universities have largely abandoned their mandate to transmit knowledge and instead operate as ideological formation centers. The evidence isn’t hidden; it’s published in teacher training materials, DEI frameworks, and curricula that treat activism as the purpose of education rather than a possible byproduct of it. Test scores in reading and math continue to slide while administrative headcount balloons. Parents discovered during the lockdown era exactly what was being taught, and the homeschool and classical education boom that followed was not a fad—it was a verdict. But tens of millions of children remain in the system, and a nation that lets its adversaries catechize its children should not be surprised by what those children grow up believing.

The United States cannot currently produce, at scale and on its own soil, many of the things it cannot live without. The overwhelming majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients trace back to China and India. Advanced semiconductors flow through a single island that Beijing openly intends to absorb. Rare earth processing, fertilizer inputs, transformer components for the electrical grid—the list of critical dependencies reads like a hostage inventory. Reshoring efforts have begun, and credit where due, but a fab takes years to build and a pharmaceutical supply chain takes longer. Until then, every foreign policy decision we make is negotiated with a quiet gun on the table, and everyone in Washington knows whose hand is on it.

Surveys from Lifeway, Barna, and the American Bible Society keep telling the same story with different numbers: enormous percentages of professing Christians cannot articulate basic doctrine, seldom open their Bibles outside of Sunday, and hold beliefs—about salvation, about the nature of Christ, about truth itself—that the historic church would have recognized as heresy. This matters for the nation because the church cannot disciple a country it has not discipled itself. A biblically illiterate Christianity becomes a mirror of the culture rather than a light to it, blown about by every wind of doctrine precisely as Paul warned. Many of the failures further up this countdown grow in the soil of this one.

Nobody is being fed to lions, and we should be careful with our language, but a quieter machinery has been assembled and tested. De-banking of disfavored ministries and businesses. Professional licensing boards weaponized against believers who decline to affirm the sexual orthodoxy of the moment. Foster and adoption agencies forced out of operation. Parents flagged for objecting at school board meetings. Each case arrives with a plausible bureaucratic justification, which is exactly what makes the pattern effective—it is deniable at every individual point while unmistakable in aggregate. The lesson being taught to orthodox Christians and patriotic conservatives is simple: you may believe whatever you like, so long as it never leaves your skull. That is not liberty. That is a probationary permit.

The Founders built a system in which the federal government handled a short, enumerated list of responsibilities and everything else lived closer to the people. That architecture has been inverted. Federal agencies now regulate the water in your backyard, the curriculum in your school district, and the appliances in your kitchen, while strings-attached federal money makes governors and mayors into franchisees of Washington. Subsidiarity—the old and deeply biblical principle that problems should be solved by the smallest competent authority—has been abandoned. The result is a nation where elections for president feel apocalyptic because we have allowed one office to matter far more than it was ever designed to.

We ran a fifty-year experiment on what happens when a society makes unlimited, escalating sexual content available to every man, woman, and child with a screen, and the results are in. Documented effects on adolescent brain development. Collapsing relationship formation among young men. An entire generation catechized in a counterfeit of intimacy before experiencing the real thing. The industry itself is inseparable from trafficking and exploitation, whatever its marketing says. And beneath the public health framing sits the older truth: this is bondage in the most literal spiritual sense, a private altar in millions of homes. Churches whisper about it while it devours their congregations. A nation cannot be strong when its men are enslaved.

Here is where some readers will get off the bus, and that’s fine—discernment requires asking questions others won’t. Congress has held hearings, the Pentagon has confirmed footage, and a topic that was career suicide a decade ago is now drip-fed to the public in coordinated increments. The question worth asking is not merely “what are they?” but “why now, why this rollout, and what is the public being prepared to accept?” If disclosure is being managed—and the choreography suggests it is—then someone has decided what conclusion we are meant to reach. Christians should note that Scripture describes deceiving spirits and a coming delusion so persuasive that even the elect would be tested. Whatever these phenomena are, the narrative being built around them deserves at least as much scrutiny as the lights in the sky.

This one is aimed inside the house. Much of American evangelicalism operates on the assumption that believers will be evacuated before anything truly difficult happens, and that assumption has consequences. A church expecting rescue does not build for endurance. It doesn’t create parallel institutions, harden its communities, or prepare its people to suffer well, because why fortify a building you’re about to leave? Set aside, for now, the exegetical debate—reasonable believers land in different places, and the timing of the rapture is not a salvation issue. The practical problem remains: if the church is still here when prophesied events unfold, millions of Christians will face a crisis of faith their pastors never prepared them for. Hope for an early rapture. Prepare for a late one.

The border crisis is usually argued in terms of numbers—encounters, gotaways, fentanyl seizures—and those numbers matter. But beneath them sits a more fundamental question that our ruling class refuses to answer directly: do nations have the right to remain nations? A country that cannot decide who enters it is not a country in any meaningful sense; it is a territory with amenities. Enforcement has improved dramatically under the current administration, and that should be acknowledged plainly. But the deeper wound is ideological. An entire generation of leaders in politics, media, and even the church was taught that borders are morally embarrassing. Until that idea is defeated—not just outvoted, but defeated—every enforcement gain is one election away from reversal.

The machinery built to protect Americans has been repeatedly aimed at them. We have watched lawfare deployed against political opponents, federal agencies coordinating with tech platforms to throttle disfavored speech, parents and pro-life activists visited by armed agents over misdemeanors, and a surveillance apparatus that treats the Fourth Amendment as a suggestion. Some of this has been exposed and some of it curtailed, but exposure is not the same as dismantlement. The censorship-industrial complex didn’t repent; it rebranded. The danger here is not only what was done but what was normalized—because precedents, once set, wait patiently for the next administration willing to use them. A government that will do this to some of its citizens has announced what it is willing to do to all of them.

Every civilization transmits a story about itself, and for a generation America’s institutions have transmitted a story of unbroken villainy. Not honest reckoning—honest reckoning is healthy and biblical—but a curated indictment in which the founding is reduced to its sins and its achievements are treated as accidents or thefts. The result is measurable: record-low percentages of young Americans say they are proud of their country or would defend it. This is not organic disillusionment; it is the intended output of an educational and cultural pipeline. A nation taught to despise its founding cannot defend it, will not sacrifice for it, and will not pass it on. You do not need to invade a country whose children have been persuaded it deserves to fall.

The Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic, and for once the government’s framing undersold the problem. Deaths of despair—suicide, overdose, alcohol—have claimed hundreds of thousands. Men are the leading casualties: fewer friendships, fewer marriages, fewer reasons offered to them for their own existence. Young people report emptiness at rates no prior generation recorded. The secular experts prescribe apps and awareness campaigns, which is like prescribing a screensaver for a house fire. The truth is older and simpler: human beings were built for God, for family, and for embodied community, in that order, and we have systematically stripped all three from American life. The void is not a mystery. It is the exact shape of what we removed.

When John wrote of the sorceries by which the nations would be deceived, the Greek word was pharmakeia—a term that bound together drugs, altered states, and occult practice as a single package. Look around. One in eight American adults takes an antidepressant. Marijuana has gone from counterculture to strip-mall commodity. Psychedelics are being rebranded as therapy and marched through the FDA with breathless media coverage, while “plant medicine” retreats fill the calendars of the same class of people who sneer at church. None of this means every prescription is illegitimate—medicine is a gift, and no one should feel condemned for treatment sought in good faith. But a nation this dependent on chemically managed consciousness should ask what it is medicating, what it is opening, and who benefits from a population that can no longer face reality sober.

Witchcraft is arguably the fastest-growing spiritual practice among young American women, and it did not spread through covens—it spread through the algorithm. WitchTok content draws billions of views. Tarot decks sell at Target. “Manifestation” is taught as a productivity technique, astrology as a personality framework, and crystals as wellness, each one an entry ramp with the theological price tag carefully removed. The generation that was told religion is superstition has not become rational; it has become pagan, exactly as Chesterton predicted. Christians who roll their eyes at this are missing the strategic picture: the enemy does not need people to worship him by name. He needs only to redirect the innate human hunger for the supernatural toward any altar but the true one.

Romans 1 describes a specific sequence: a people who knew God refuse to honor Him, and so He gives them over—to darkened thinking, to degraded passions, to a debased mind. Read that chapter slowly and then read the news. The most sobering interpretation of America’s condition is not that judgment is coming but that a form of it is already here, and that it looks less like fire from heaven than like restraint being lifted—a nation handed over to the consequences of what it demanded. America is not Israel and holds no covenant of that kind, so we should be careful with the parallel. But the principle of Romans 1 is not covenant-specific; it is a description of how God deals with any people who suppress the truth. The question is whether we are early or late in the sequence.

Washington’s foreign policy establishment maintains commitments on every continent while the country underwriting them decays from within. Hundreds of billions have flowed to Ukraine. The Iran war is draining us financially and militarily. Taiwan looms as the crisis that could dwarf both. Reasonable patriots disagree about each of these individually—there are real monsters in the world, and retreat has costs too. But the aggregate picture is a nation spending its blood, treasure, and attention policing a global order while its own border, grid, cities, and families crumble. Empires historically fall not from a single defeat but from overextension meeting internal rot. We are running both experiments simultaneously and calling it leadership.

A self-governing people must be able to argue from common facts, and that capacity is nearly gone. Algorithmic feeds sort Americans into custom realities. Legacy media burned its credibility across a decade of provable falsehoods, and the alternatives that replaced it carry their own incentives to inflame. Now AI-generated text, images, and video flood the zone, making the dead internet theory less a conspiracy than a description, and pushing us toward a world where any inconvenient evidence can be dismissed as fake and any fake can be laundered as evidence. This is an epistemological crisis with national security implications: a country that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate, cannot self-correct, and can be steered by whoever controls the filters.

The oldest lie in recorded history was “ye shall be as gods,” and it is now a funded research agenda. Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures speak openly of merging with machines, defeating death, and building artificial superintelligence—some of them using explicitly religious language about creating that which they will then, in their own words, worship. Brain-computer interfaces are in human trials. Embryo selection is a commercial service. Life-extension ventures absorb billions. Each technology arrives with genuine medical promise attached, which is precisely how such offers always arrive. The question Christians must press is not whether these tools can heal—some can—but whether a civilization that no longer believes in God can be trusted to redesign the creature made in His image.

Central bank digital currencies are marketed as convenience and settled as control. Money that is programmable is money that can be switched off, geofenced, expiration-dated, or conditioned on behavior—and anyone who considers that paranoid should review what happened to the bank accounts of Canadian truckers, or the quiet de-banking campaigns against gun dealers, crypto firms, and ministries here at home. Political resistance has produced real wins, including federal pushback against a retail CBDC, but the architecture advances anyway through instant-payment rails, digital ID initiatives, and private-sector proxies that accomplish the same surveillance with better branding. The endpoint is a financial system where dissent has a purchase history. Sound money in your own possession is not nostalgia; it is exit.

Every healthy civilization in history has understood that children are to be protected from adult matters until they mature. Ours has inverted this into a principle of liberation. Sexualized content in school libraries defended as literature. Gender ideology introduced to children too young to spell it, in some cases advancing to medicalization pathways that other Western nations are now retreating from after reviewing the evidence. Screens engineered by the world’s best behavioral scientists to capture developing minds, delivering content no parent would choose. These are distinct problems with distinct culprits, but they share a target and a result: childhood itself is being foreclosed. Christ reserved His most severe warning—the millstone—for those who cause little ones to stumble. It is not a minor item on this list.

The threat to the American church that no external enemy could accomplish is being managed from inside. Prosperity preachers sell God as a vending machine to audiences of millions. Progressive denominations shed doctrine after doctrine to chase a culture that despises them anyway, then wonder at their empty pews. Seeker-driven megachurches replace discipleship with production values, delivering motivational content to crowds that were never confronted with sin, repentance, or the cross. Scripture warned of this explicitly—teachers accumulated to suit itching ears, a form of godliness denying its power. The nation’s spiritual immune system is compromised not because the church is persecuted but because so much of what carries the name no longer carries the message.

Strip away the clinical vocabulary and the ancient practice stands recognizable. The worshipers of Molech offered their children in exchange for prosperity, security, and an unencumbered future—the same exchange rate offered today, with better lighting and a euphemism. Tens of millions of American children have been aborted since 1973. The overturning of Roe returned the question to the states, and some states responded by enshrining the practice more deeply than Roe ever required, while chemical abortion by mail now accounts for the majority of cases and erases most remaining oversight. Scripture’s response to Molech was not ambivalent, and the prophets did not soften the charge because the practice was popular. A nation is measured by what it does to its most defenseless, and ours has made its answer a constitutional sacrament in half its territory.

On the issues where the donor class is united—endless spending, foreign intervention, mass legal migration, surveillance reauthorization, corporate consolidation—Washington’s two parties reliably discover bipartisanship. The theatrical combat is reserved for cultural questions that mobilize voters without threatening budgets. This is the uniparty problem, and acknowledging it does not require cynicism about every individual legislator; there are genuine fighters in both chambers, and the populist realignment of the past decade has been a real disruption to the machine. But the machine adapts. Controlled opposition is an old intelligence technique for a reason: the most effective way to neutralize a movement is to lead it. Voters should support their champions and audit them relentlessly, because the door out of the uniparty is always also a door in.

The American promise was never wealth; it was attainability—the confidence that an ordinary family, working ordinary jobs, could own a home, raise children, and retire with dignity. Run the numbers on that promise today. Median home prices have detached from median incomes to a degree unseen in generations. Young adults carry record debt into a market where the starter home is extinct and the starter family is postponed indefinitely—birth and marriage rates track housing costs more closely than any sermon on values ever could. Meanwhile asset holders have grown spectacularly wealthy on the very inflation that priced everyone else out. This is not capitalism failing; it is a rigged monetary system doing exactly what rigged monetary systems do: transferring wealth from those who earn dollars to those who own things.

The debt has blown past $37 trillion with no braking mechanism in sight, and the interest payments alone now rival what we spend on national defense—we are approaching the point of borrowing money to pay the interest on borrowed money, which every household in America recognizes as the final stage before ruin. No serious person in either party proposes a genuine solution, because the honest options—deep cuts, default, or inflation—are all politically fatal, and so the chosen path is the quiet one: debase the currency and let the math hide in your grocery bill. This is why the dollar’s reserve status erodes, why BRICS nations accumulate gold, and why central banks themselves are buying it at historic rates. They can read the ending. The fiat experiment that began in 1971 is not eternal, and the wise are positioning for what follows rather than debating whether it arrives.

Set aside, for one paragraph, the arguments about any particular election, and observe the wreckage common to all sides: enormous portions of the country—the majorities shift depending on who lost last—no longer believe American elections are conducted fairly. That is a five-alarm fire regardless of which claims you credit, because consent of the governed is not a slogan; it is the load-bearing wall. Mass mail balloting, extended voting windows, opaque machine systems, and courts that dismissed challenges on procedure rather than evidence all fed the crisis, and the institutions’ preferred remedy—instructing citizens to stop asking questions—has worked exactly as well as it deserves to. Restoring verifiable, transparent elections should be the one demand that unites everyone who intends to keep living in a republic. That it instead remains a partisan football tells you how much the current arrangement suits those it benefits.

Artificial intelligence is already writing code, processing claims, drafting legal documents, generating marketing, and answering customer calls, and the systems improve every quarter while the political class offers nothing but vibes. This time the disruption climbs the ladder—white-collar, credentialed, middle-class work is squarely in the blast radius, the very jobs that were supposed to be the safe harbor from the last wave of offshoring and automation. Perhaps new categories of work emerge, as optimists promise; perhaps they emerge too slowly for the tens of millions caught in between. Nobody in either party has a real answer, and the answers being incubated in Davos and Silicon Valley—universal basic income as a pacification stipend—should alarm anyone paying attention, because a population that depends on the state for its bread has surrendered the last leverage a free people holds.

Nearly every pathology on this list has its taproot here. Marriage rates sit at historic lows. The birth rate has fallen far below replacement and keeps falling. Roughly one in four American children lives without a father in the home, and the data on what follows fatherlessness—poverty, incarceration, addiction, abuse, academic failure—is as close to settled as social science gets, which is precisely why it is so rarely discussed. The family is the first government, the first church, the first economy, and the first school; no institution downstream can compensate for its failure, though we have spent trillions trying. This did not simply happen. Policy punished marriage, culture mocked it, and an economy rigged against household formation finished the job. Rebuilding the American family is not one item on the national to-do list. It is the precondition for the rest of the list mattering.

Somewhere around 40 million Americans have stopped attending church in the past few decades—the largest and fastest religious shift in the nation’s history, dwarfing the Great Awakenings in scale while running in reverse. The researchers behind the dechurching data found something that should sting: most leavers did not storm out over doctrine or scandal. They drifted—moved cities, changed schedules, fell out of habit—and no one came looking for them. Whatever the mechanism, the consequence compounds through everything above this entry: the church is the institution that forms consciences, binds neighbors, disciples families, and restrains the state by nurturing a people who answer to a higher authority. An America without the church is not a neutral America. It is a mission field with nuclear weapons, and the vacancy is already being filled by every counterfeit on this list.

If you have read this far and felt the pattern—the strange coordination of it all, the way every institution seemed to turn against the family, the church, the child, and the truth at roughly the same time—you have two available explanations. One requires a smoke-filled room and a conspiracy of implausible competence. The other is written in Ephesians 6: we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. The coordination we observe does not require a human mastermind if there is a spiritual intelligence behind it, and Scripture states plainly that there is. This is why the countdown ends here rather than with any policy failure: every other item on this list is a battlefield, but this is the war. It also means the decisive weapons are not the ones deployed in Washington. They never were.

Pray for America at least daily.