(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) Two notable events happened Sunday night that, at first glance, may have seemed unrelated to the casual observer. 

Yet, both proved that, for all its virtue-signaling about safeguarding democracy against Russian President Vladimir Putin, the woke Left is playing right into the ex-KGB spymaster’s hands in his bid to weaken and subvert America from within.

In Las Vegas, the Kansas City Chiefs triumphed over the San Francisco 49ers in an overtime nailbiter to win the NFL’s Super Bowl LVIII.

An estimated 126 million tuned into the game, many of them drawn by the prospect of seeing pop star Taylor Swift root for her boyfriend, Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

The turnout made it by far the most-watched Super Bowl—and, possibly, one of the biggest television events on record after the 1969 moon landing, which was a symbolic victory in the U.S. space race against the Soviet Union.

Kicking things off on Sunday, in controversial fashion for the second year running, was a performance of the so-called black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” by 2021 Oscar nominee Andra Day.

Andra Day sings “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at the Super Bowl.

pic.twitter.com/zOXnSlWuqg

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) February 11, 2024

The song drew considerable backlash on social media, but Democrats relished in the scandal, with one black lawmaker brazenly scolding attendees over the fact that many people did not stand for it in due reverence.

Supporters tout the song’s heritage, inspiring lyrics and beauty as a fitting recognition of the league’s mostly black players.

Detractors, however, point out that it is divisive and disrespectful—not to mention racist—to insist upon a “separate but equal” national anthem.

This is the exact reason why there is only one national anthem. pic.twitter.com/3oJLnOMoiO

— Steve 🇺🇸 (@SteveLovesAmmo) February 11, 2024

A PREOCCUPATION W/ PUTIN

Meanwhile, roughly 2,500 miles away from Sin City’s Allegiant Stadium—at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.—67 senators voted to advance an appropriations bill that would deliver some $61 billion in additional funding for Ukraine’s war with Russia.

The Senate would go on to pass the $95 billion total in federal spending on foreign aid (including Israel and Taiwan) early Tuesday, although its fate in the House remains uncertain.

In justifying the unpopular vote RINO North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis declared, “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” according to Punchbowl News.

The controversial bill, predictably, follows an uptick in rhetoric from the Left and its allies claiming that former President Donald Trump and his supporters are Putin apologists for their efforts to reject the latest aid package while casting doubt on the underlying motives of America’s support for Ukraine.

Trump sells out our NATO allies to Putin.

This should be front-page news of every paper in the country.

These are the stakes of 2024. https://t.co/z1dQGQWbPF

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 12, 2024

Many in the mainstream media lost their heads over Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with the Russian president.

The two-hour segment made clear that Putin, unintimidated by the ex-Fox News host, was pushing his own propaganda, just as the Biden administration and its media lapdogs push theirs in an equal and opposite direction.

Unlike Biden, though, Putin is a master liar—more akin to Barack Obama—in his ability to speak in half-truths that, while not technically false, distort the context of an argument to reach devious conclusions. During a 2022 summit at the University of Chicago, Obama even praised Putin for his “absolute control of information.”

Putin won points from Carlson’s viewers by condemning the murder of Ashli Babbitt during the Jan. 6 uprising, but he also denied any connection with the long list of critics and political dissidents that he, himself, is suspected of killing.

“We don’t have this kind of habit of assassinating anybody,” he claimed.

Putin likewise hammered the Biden administration for its open borders and profligate spending, but only as part of an apparent effort to urge an end to the U.S. involvement in Ukraine.

“You have issues on the border; issues with migration; issues with the national debt—more than $33 trillion,” he said.

“You have nothing better to do, so you should fight in Ukraine,” he continued. “Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today?”

Vladimir Putin to Tucker Carlson:

"We are thousands of miles away… You have issues on your border, issues with migration, issues with national debt at $33 trillion."

"You have nothing better to do than fight in Ukraine? Would it be better to negotiate?" pic.twitter.com/gYS3LAIHNU

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 8, 2024

RUSSIA’S RED HERRING?

As many critics have observed, the Biden administration’s preoccupation with Ukraine (and with foreign wars in general) has weakened our hand domestically.

In a recent speech opposing the Senate’s approval of the additional Ukraine funding, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., noted that the deal does a lot to line the pockets of those in bed with the defense industry, while depriving most tax-paying Americans of their own defense spending.

“Open the champagne, pop the cork. They’ve got $60 billion they’re bringing. They’re taking your money to Kyiv,” Paul said in his speech on the Senate floor Monday.

BREAKING – EXPLOSIVE: Rand Paul (@RandPaul) EXPLODES, blasts Senate Republican and Democratic leaders. They have only time to "Open the champagne, pop the cork. They've got $60 billion they're bringing. They’re taking your money to Kyiv." WATCH pic.twitter.com/CAlWOWQ70H

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) February 12, 2024

Although some have suggested that the underlying goal of the Ukraine operation is to keep Russia’s military forces preoccupied, the effect has been quite the opposite, depleting America’s military equipment and resources on a quagmire with no clear objectives or strategy, while diverting funds that might be used to secure the U.S. border and ease the inflationary economy.

If the proxy war in Ukraine is really a game of cat-and-mouse with the Kremlin, one has to wonder who is chasing whom.

It may be impossible to know to what extent Putin’s CIA counterpart, the Sluzhba vneshney razvedki has infiltrated the U.S., but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

The evidence of foreign infiltration and influence is right before our eyes in the fast-spreading institutional disfunction we have witnessed—beginning with the Obama era, when the 44th president promised Putin surrogate Dmitry Medvedev in 2012, “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev, who was then serving as the official Russian president, appeared to respond, “I’ll transmit this information to Vladimir” before receiving a pat on the arm from Obama.

THE REDS AND THE BLACKS

Nothing has been more effective at undermining the United States, in fact, than the toxic identity politics that have become central to the Left’s platform.

Political correctness has laid waste to our education system and crippled our military. Indeed, it has achieved many of the objectives on a famous list of 45 Soviet objectives for bringing down America that first surfaced in 1958 and was entered into the congressional record in 1963.

The communist plan to incite racial discord within the United States as a means of bringing revolution, however, began even earlier than that. It traces back to the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, which was held in Moscow in July and August of 1928.

A follow-up membership meeting for the Communist Party USA occurred on Oct. 2, 1928, and delivered the key takeaways of the Comintern congress.

Words like “decolonization” that may seem relatively new to the uninitiated appear in this manifesto, which lay long dormant as political operatives spent nearly a century laying the groundwork in their plan to capture total cultural and political control of the West.

With respect to America’s black population, the communist efforts may, at first, have seemed quite laudable as they played a major role in advancing parts of the civil rights movement.

The International Labor Defense represented the defendants in a high-profile 1931 trial in Scottsboro, Ala., involving nine black men who were sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women on a train.

After clashing over the defense strategy with the fledgling NAACP, the ILD took control of the appeals process, bringing national attention to the case and getting the convictions overturned initially, although the “Scottsboro Boys” would be retried two more times and ultimately convicted.

While the communist-backed group became popular with blacks for defending their civil rights in the Jim Crow era, little did they know that they were simply being used as pawns in Joseph Stalin’s master plan.

As the minutes of the CPUSA’s October 1928 meeting indicated, “The especially intense exploitation and heavy oppression to which the millions of Negroes in America are subject make it imperative for the party to devote its best energies and its maximum resources towards becoming the recognized leader and champion of the interests of Negroes as an oppressed people.”

However, they went on to suggest that the true underlying purpose was not to achieve racial equality as a means of strengthening America, but to weaken it by provoking a race-based Marxist revolution.

“Our objective, of course, here is to have the Negro proletariat assume the hegemony in the entire Negro national movement,” it said. “We will on a subsequent occasion discuss the details of this question, particularly the decision of the Congress supplementing our Negro Program for complete social and political equality with the slogan of self-determination for the Negroes in the United States.”

A SHIFT IN STRATEGY

By the 1970s, America had weathered the growing pains of its civil rights movement. The overt communist influence may have been largely neutralized by the McCarthyism of the 1950s, although it continued to germinate in universities and underground political organizations via the 1960s counterculture movement.

Unfortunately for the Soviets, things weren’t going according to plan. Perhaps it was the fact that President Lyndon B. Johnson had made the drastic pivot from racist to civil rights champion after seeing the survival of the Democratic Party at stake.

While pandering to blacks and other minority communities helped, in a way, to prevent them from becoming more radicalized by outside influences like the Soviets, Johnson remained anti-communist and kept the Democrats still largely centered on American values.

Thus, in 1971, the KGB launched Operation Pandora, an active effort to trigger a race war by fomenting serious acts of violence, including planting bombs in black communities and blaming right-wing extremists.

Race riots following the 1968 death of Martin Luther King Jr. had proven effective in moving the political dial, and the communists took note as they tried to align themselves with members of the radical Black Panthers militia.

“Because the rise of negro protest in the USA will bring definite difficulties to the ruling classes of the USA and will distract the attention of the Nixon administration from pursuing an active foreign policy, we would consider it feasible to implement a number of measures to support this movement and to assist its growth,” Soviet KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov wrote in a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, as reported by the National Association of Scholars.

Many of the Soviet efforts, in fact, revolved around stoking tensions between blacks and Jews in the hopes that undermining U.S. support for Israel would help the U.S.S.R. gain a strategic foothold in the Middle East.

THE REVOLUTION IS REBORN

Ostensibly, Operation Pandora came to an end in the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration discovered and dismantled a KGB spy ring.

Andropov, the longtime ringleader at the KGB, died in 1984, having climbed the ladder to become general secretary of the Communist Party and nominal leader of the U.S.S.R.

A year after his death, Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power, ushering in the end of the Soviet Union.

Putin, who took over in the year 2000, has often expressed admiration for Andropov and modeled some of his policies after him.

Meanwhile, Angela Davis—the former black militant and American communist party candidate whose efforts were instrumental in advancing the field of critical race theory—celebrated Obama’s 2008 election as “a victory, not of an individual, but of … people who refused to believe that it was impossible to elect a person, a black person, who identified with the black radical tradition.”

Small wonder that Obama seemed so cordial with Putin during his presidency, even while laying the groundwork for the 2014 color revolution in Ukraine that would provide Russia with the cover story it needed to reclaim the Crimean peninsula and set the stage for its present military operations.

Obama’s actions to undermine U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East—allowing the rise of ISIS, sending money to Iran and alienating Israel—likewise benefitted Putin strategically.

And, of course, his policies and rhetoric helped lay the foundation for the apotheosis of wokeism following the uncannily well-timed death of George Floyd in May 2020.

Leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement that rose to prominence following Floyd’s death acknowledged that they were trained in Marxist thought—and they seemed to cast themselves, in many ways, as a revival of the 1970s-era Black Liberation Army.

A few months later, during the opening Sunday of the NFL’s 2020 season, the majority of players on the Baltimore Ravens stood for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” but knelt immediately after for “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” is currently being played. Ravens players are lined up at the goal line, while the Browns returned to their locker room. It looks like one Raven is kneeling. pic.twitter.com/DfGlVdXpFq

— Daniel Oyefusi (@DanielOyefusi) September 13, 2020

Whatever money Congress is sending to show its performative support for an unwinnable war at the Ukraine–Russia border, Putin undoubtedly is laughing with the knowledge that he has now thoroughly infiltrated America’s interior, without even having to cross the Rio Grande.

The dueling “national anthems” are the culmination of Russia’s 100-year plot to divide and conquer its greatest geopolitical rival. And the Left’s insinuations that it is MAGA doing the bidding of our foreign adversary may be the Andropov’s greatest trick yet, even 40 years after his death.

Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/realbensellers.