Review of “Plundered: How Progressive Ideology Is Destroying America”
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D., earned his advanced degrees in the fields of ecosystems and climatology. In August 1994, his 11th-hour warning to the U.S. Senate about the UN-generated Biodiversity Treaty succeeded in scuttling the liberal and internationalist plans to have our nation ratify the pact. Had the senators done as expected and approved the treaty, their action, Coffman warned at the time, would have launched an attack on property rights and started a program to herd huge numbers of Americans into human occupation zones in metropolitan areas. Fantastic? Not when you look at the evidence. Americans who value private property and reject being forced away from the land owe him a large debt of gratitude.

Dr. Coffman’s experience with the plans to socialize America through various highly questionable environmental claims led him to undertake further investigation of other designs on America. He attributes many of our nation’s problems to the rising influence of “progressives.” Claiming that “America is at war” and most Americans “don’t know it,” he blames the harm done by our nation’s deficient public education system as well as the steady stream of propaganda spewed out by our nation’s progressive-dominated mainstream media. He sees all of this as steady deterioration that has led America away from the “Constitutional Republic established by our Founding Fathers.” So he wrote the 320-page book Plundered: How Progressive Ideology Is Destroying America to explain what has happened and is still happening.

In Plundered, he presents compelling evidence, from UN sources, showing that the Biodiversity Treaty is about controlling both people and the environment in the name of protecting biodiversity. He also warns against Agenda 21 and other designs that threaten our freedoms and way of life including the debt crisis.

According to Dr. Coffman, progressives are socialists who have achieved great influence in government and in both the Democratic and Republican parties. Tracing their start from the 1880s, they have, he says, acquired their influence by “relentless lying, intimidating, bullying, mocking, demonizing, and even destroying anyone or anything that stands in their way.” He traces their growing clout from their reliance on the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century French atheist whom he dubs “the father of socialism and communism” and the philosophical father of the disastrous 1789 French Revolution. In contrast, Coffman touts the writings of John Locke, the 17th century Englishman whose Two Treatises on Government he credits for the thinking that spurred the United States to break away from Mother England. He hopes to revive interest in Locke while having the nation abandon the revolutionary ideas of Rousseau.

In its widespread survey of past and current historical figures, Plundered point critical fingers at Horace Mann, John Dewey, Carroll Quigley, George Soros, Saul Alinsky, and numerous others. The book contains chapters about our nation’s debt crisis, the takeover of education, the United Nations, even the Occupy Wall Street movement. Coffman is at his best when he writes about the danger to our nation and its people from the UN’s Agenda 21 and the many questionable claims about environmental crises.   

All of the important facts in this valuable book are buttressed by 30 pages of footnotes and careful documentation. Along the way, Dr. Coffman enthuses about the wonders of America given us by the Founders and then outlines a program to rescue America and return the nation he loves to the principles of good government that made the United States the envy of the world. 

All in all, Plundered is a valuable resource, a good read, and an introduction to America’s woes for any newly awakening American, and a guide to taking America back from the progressives and their allies.

Plundered: How Progressive Ideology Is Destroying America, by Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D., Bangor, Maine: Environmental Perspectives, Inc., 2012, 320 pages, paperback.