Randy Elf

CHAUTAUQUA–Chautauqua Institution’s 2026 season kicks off this weekend.

Among the first speakers is Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, who addresses Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua, or ABC, at 3 p.m. Monday in the Athenaeum Hotel.

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Before getting to that, let’s salute ABC’s hundreds of supporters, without whose encouragement–both moral and financial–ABC couldn’t have enjoyed the success that it has enjoyed and which needs to continue. You, faithful reader of this column, already understand that their effective persistence is making an historically great institution an even greater place.

Let’s also take a moment to salute ABC’s leaders, who each year dedicate countless hours to the cause. Their tireless devotion–and the smiles that rarely leave their faces–have also been essential to ABC’s success.

Thank you to ABC’s supporters and leaders.

If you haven’t been to an ABC program, pick a Monday afternoon this summer, and come to the Athenaeum Hotel at 3:00.

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Schweizer’s 2026 book is The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.

Schweizer’s introduction sets the stage for the 10 chapter book.

He writes that tens of millions of immigrants have come to America, proud of both their ethnic heritage and of their new country. They “respect American laws, work hard, and adopt American values, culture, and language.”

Nevertheless, other countries are using migration to this country to destabilize the republic, he writes. Hostile foreign governments, friendly ones, radical foreign movements, and terrorist organizations use the American tradition of welcoming newcomers to subvert the United States.

Supporting such countries are domestic forces sharing their goals or seeking political benefit, he writes. Mass migration is designed “to promote malevolent agendas against the United States, including the creation of powerful political networks inside our country designed to undermine us.”

Rather than being racist, recognizing “migration with deleterious intent” highlights the vulnerability of a country with a “heritage of welcoming people of all races and cultures,” he writes. This isn’t being “conducted by a cabal of capitalists” seeking cheap labor but “by foreign governments and political movements operating inside the United States, aided and abetted by domestic political actors who seek partisan political gains.”

This is more than a border crisis, he writes. It’s a weapon “with devastating effect long after the border crisis seems ‘solved,'” he writes. Its goal is subversion.

Schweizer writes that this is “a clash of civilizations manifest inside the United States itself,” with the “clash designed to displace American democratic civilizational values. Ironically, it is these values that uniquely bind Americans together–respect for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, not a single ethnicity–that is at stake.”

He recalls masses of migrants streaming into the United States in recent years, with “illegal migrants clogging American shelters, all while criminal gangs wreak havoc on America’s streets.”

This played a role in the 2024 American presidential election, he writes, and the Trump 47 administration has “reduced the deluge of humanity to a trickle.”

Yet that, rather than being the end of the problem, “is, perhaps, the end of the beginning phase of solving the ongoing and largely unrecognized existential threat that we face. That threat is subversion,” Schweizer writes. “Subversion is an effort by which the values and principles of a system are reversed or contradicted to undermine and sabotage an established social order.”

Schweizer sees this happening “on a grand scale in the United States using stealth weapons.”

“To succeed, they use a mass infusion of people and work aggressively to prevent these masses from assimilating so that American values are destabilized,” he writes. “This subversive mission exploits American openness and generosity, but also requires willing collaborators in the United States who share the vision or at least see it as a means to power. They also seek to use migrants as radical agents of change.”

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If you haven’t noticed, Peter Schweizer doesn’t exactly pull punches.

And that’s just what one finds in the introduction of his 2026 book. The 10 chapters have much, much more.

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On its website, https://www.abcatchq.com, ABC posts videos of most of its speakers.

ABC was formed in 2018. Its mission is “to achieve a balance of speakers in a mutually civil and respectful environment consistent with the historic mission of Chautauqua Institution”. ABC is its own Section 501(c)(3) organization, legally separate from the institution.

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Dr. Randy Elf’s Aug. 20, 2020, ABC presentation, on “How Political Speech Law Benefits Politicians and the Rich,” is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ebymA7xOo.

COPYRIGHT © 2026 BY RANDY ELF