Did you know that Republicans now claiming to back President Trump on tariffs made “free trade” possible? Did you know that “free trade” is a Marxist concept designed to exacerbate class warfare?

It is time to understand how we got into this predicament.

Having been around Washington, D.C. for almost 50 years, I know something about the movement of real conservatives that made President Trump’s “trade wars” possible. William J. Gill, author of the book Trade Wars Against America, ran an organization called the American Coalition for Competitive Trade (ACCT), which filed suit against NAFTA , the North American Free Trade Agreement, and had planned other legal actions against the GATT/World Trade Organization and trade with China.

Then, however, the courts ruled in favor of global free trade.

William J. Gill had it right – the real trade wars were being waged against America. Unfortunately, his legal case, which argued that NAFTA violated the Constitution of the United States, was dismissed. The governments of Canada and Mexico intervened on behalf of President Bill Clinton, who passed NAFTA and its implementation act with the assistance of Republican Newt Gingrich in the House of Representatives.

ACCT argued that NAFTA was unconstitutional because it gave away judicial power to decide disputes over trade policies to international bodies.

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999, Gingrich reversed his support for “free trade” and now appears regularly on Fox News to support Trump’s tariffs.

In 1993, as he pressed for passage of NAFTA, Clinton said, “I believe that Newt Gingrich believes in NAFTA just like I do. And I believe he wants it to pass. And do I trust him to do everything he can to deliver every vote he can? You bet I do.”

Back in 1997, ACCT had warned of the big increase in illegal immigration, “now amounting to the greatest invasion any nation has been subjected to in all history,” that followed NAFTA taking effect in January 1994. ACCT warned that the increase in illegal immigration was “inextricably intertwined with the importation of drugs and crime from Mexico under NAFTA.” It cited a “sharp surge in drug abuse among young people being driven by the collapse in Customs enforcement at the Mexican border.”

As I argued in my 1995 book Global Bondage, a major problem with free trade is that it provides perfect cover for drug trafficking and drug-money laundering. NAFTA, a pact to spur business activity by lowering trade barriers and reduce border inspections between the United States, Canada, and Mexico, facilitated illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the United States from Mexico.

By any objective measure, so-called “free trade” facilitated the destruction of American sovereignty, leading to more Americans dying from dangerous drugs that were being smuggled into the United States by Mexico and now China. This is a big reason why President Trump has cited a national emergency to justify tariffs on foreign nations like China, Canada, and Mexico.

In a newsletter about the passing away of one of ACCT’s strongest supporters, anti-communist researcher Robert J. Morris, Gill noted that “He understood that Karl Marx backed free trade because it would destroy the sovereignty of nations – the goal of Communism and of the insane elitists who are driving us towards world government.”

Marx supported free trade, calling it “destructive” but positive because it “hastens social revolution” through destroying the proletariat, the workers. He thought this would cause them to embrace communist revolution. He called free trade a “revolutionary” force in human history that would propel capitalist nations into socialism and then communism.

But the workers would not only lose their jobs; they would lose their lives. In the United States, however, they embraced Trump, not communist revolution.

The ACCT advisory board members included several prominent anti-communists, such as Herbert A. Philbrick, a former FBI informant in the Communist Party; and Howard Phillips, chairman of the U.S. Taxpayers Alliance, which became the U.S. Constitution Party.

A member of ACCT’s board was William von Raab, former United States Commissioner of Customs, who spoke about “free trade” facilitating drug shipments from Mexico.

In our book Permanent Revolution: The Secret Life and Legacy of Barack Hussein Obama, we analyzed the plan of the free trade globalists, led by George Soros, and its ultimate objective: to flood the United States with illegal drugs and then “solve” the problem by legalizing them, creating another class of citizens dependent on drugs provided by the state. It was a new version of Huxley’s Brave New World.

Important work exposing the plan was done by Joseph Douglass, Jr., whose book Red Cocaine, documented a major Communist role in international drug trafficking. The purpose of the Communist campaign was not only to demoralize the West, but to raise hard currency and identify drug users who could be blackmailed for intelligence purposes.

Under a UN-sponsored plan to legalize drugs on a worldwide basis, as recommended by the George Soros-funded Global Commission on Drug Policy, drug trafficking countries and narco-states such as Mexico would become “respectable.” Notorious drug traffickers and their bankers would be transformed into legitimate businessmen.

HSBC, a British-based bank, allowed Mexican drug cartels and terrorist groups to launder dirty money through the U.S. financial system, but the Obama administration did not prosecute bank officials on criminal charges. The House Financial Services Committee released a staff report of its investigation into the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision not to prosecute HSBC. One of the findings was that:

“Senior DOJ leadership, including Attorney General [Eric] Holder, overruled an internal recommendation by DOJ’s Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section to prosecute HSBC because of DOJ leadership’s concern that prosecuting the bank would have serious adverse consequences on the financial system.”

In the scheme known as Fast and Furious, the Biden administration authorized a gun-running operation that put deadly weapons into the hands of narcotics traffickers from Mexico. Those weapons were used to kill U.S. border agent Brian Terry.

The Obama administration was also accused of obstructing justice in probes regarding alleged drug-trafficking and money-laundering schemes tied to the Hezbollah terror group.

In his second term, Trump has put pressure on Canada and Mexico to stop shipments of fentanyl to the United States. In fact, citing the “extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl,” he declared a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and imposed tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China.

Now, Sara Carter, an investigative reporter and Fox News contributor, has been nominated by Trump to run the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). With a background of work along the U.S. Mexico border that included many national security-related stories, she now has an opportunity to not only expose the involvement of governments like Mexico in the drug trade but the banks and financial operators based in the United States that are laundering the drug money.