Former confidants of Hitler did not get out of Germany alive, but Hermann Rauschning did. He later published verbatim private conversations with Hitler between 1932 and 1935, revealing a strategy to gain control of America that would have astonished the Allies. The author’s intimate revelations of Hitler’s personality, describing his morbid silence flashing into prophetic rants, are probably the most authentic on record.

Hitler used a coded index on strategic individuals to facilitate ensnaring them in his plans. Rauschning’s The Voice of Destruction quotes Hitler on his tactic: “Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself. How? Achieve its moral breakdown before the war has started. We… We shall find friends who will help us in all the enemy countries. We shall know how to obtain such friends. Mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, indecisiveness, panic: these are our weapons.”

Hitler was able to recruit celebrities with praise and via extortion by using a detailed profile index. With it he efficiently cultivated a large camp of sympathizers such as Charles Lindberg, the abdicated King Edward VIII, Henry Ford, and Catholic radio star Fr. Charles Coughlin.

He gave further details: “I have drawn up a questionnaire covering details of the persons I am interested in. I am having a comprehensive card index compiled (by IBM) of every influential person in the world. The cards contain every detail of importance. … Will he take money? Can he be bought in any other way? Is he vain? Is he sexual? In what way? Is he homosexual? That one is of the utmost value because it provides close associations that cannot be escaped. Has he anything in his past to conceal? Can he be subjected to pressure? What is his business? His hobby, his favorite sports, his likes and dislikes? Does he like to travel? And on and on. It is on the strength of these reports that I choose my men. That is real politics. I get men who will work for me. I create a force of my own in every country.”

Lest anyone thinks this cataloging technique died with Hitler, consider the rampage of J. Edgar Hoover. At the age of 29, he became the first director of the FBI and revamped its bureaucracy to feed his dictatorial, obsessive-compulsive disorder. He ascribed kudos to himself actually earned by his subordinates during Senator Joe McCarthy’s hunt for communists in the 1940s and 50s. In the 1960s and 70s, Hoover focused on the civil rights movement, looking for “dirt” on Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy.

Hoover then aimed at organized crime, and facilitated a long trail of suspicious assassinations. He likely helped ruin careers (Leonard Bernstein and Charlie Chaplin) and precipitated suicides (actresses Jean Seberg and Marilyn Monroe). He kept a 400-page dossier on Albert Einstein and a 3,900-page file on Eleanor Roosevelt’s extra-marital affairs. Hoover managed to keep his FBI dictatorship for 48 years, artfully persuading FDR and seven other presidents with embarrassing data on their own conduct.

Such tactics are still being used by self-appointed global leaders to gain power for their own benefit.

One user of that magic formula for power is Klaus Schwab, founder and head of the World Economic Forum (WEF) since 1987. Schwab was born in Ravensburg, Germany, in 1938. (His father, Eugen Schwab, was a collaborating Nazi party member who served the Third Reich war effort as director of Escher Wyss AG, an industrial company that used enslaved labor to manufacture weapons for the Nazi war machine.)

In his book The Great Reset, Schwab proposes that no one nation can solve the climate or financial ills of the world, but that a close-knit collaboration of large corporations could accomplish global survival without fickle democracy getting in the way. But first, the existing social fabric must be broken down and demolished to build back better. That slogan adopted by Biden suggests his ardent support for Schwab’s perspective and plan.

In 2017 Klaus Schwab related how his 40 years of political influence have reached deep into the center of nations. “I have to say, when I mention names, like Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum… But what we are very proud of now is that our younger generation has Prime Minister [Justin] Trudeau… We have penetrated his cabinet. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders.”

Over 1,350 alumni of the WEF’s Young Leaders Conference have advanced to influential positions, like Derek Williamson, senior editor of Bloomberg News; Steven B. Spinelli, Jr., President of Babson College; David E. Rainbolt, Chairman of Banc First; and several U.S. congressmen and state governors. Each year 120 leaders, assessed and profiled before getting invited, attend that leadership conference.

Schwab’s boast about Trudeau gives one pause. After all, Trudeau for the first time used Emergency Act powers to freeze the bank accounts of ordinary citizen-truckers participating in a peaceful democratic assembly. The Great Reset appears to include authoritarianism, moral confusion, and only approved versions of civil unrest. And toss in another war.

Lord Acton is credited with saying “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Time and again this proves true. Once any human conclave attains dictatorial powers, it thirsts for more and thereby fails to serve the people. In his recent and first TED talk, Pope Francis said the same thing in another way: “History has shown that too much power simply corrupts mankind. Man has a way of attempting to exercise his power to brutal extents in order to win.”