The Cloward-Piven Strategy

There’s a kind of evil that doesn’t wear a mask or carry a weapon, it wears a smile, quotes statistics, and calls bankruptcy “compassion.” The Cloward-Piven Strategy is not just academic folly. It is a deliberate plan to overload a welfare system until it implodes, with the goal of replacing it with a centrally controlled state apparatus. It is not about helping the poor, it is about weaponizing them.

The idea is simple, to flood the system with dependency. Push as many people as possible onto welfare, housing, food assistance, and every available “entitlement”. Then, when the system can no longer manage the administrative burden, use the chaos to demand federal control, universal basic income, and nationalised “solutions.” It's like throwing rocks through windows and then selling burglar bars as philanthropy.

This is a form of soft revolution, a political arson that uses economic fire to torch the old order. Behind the façade of social justice is the aim to erase accountability, destroy merit, and centralise power in the hands of those who claim to be saviours while engineering the very suffering they promise to cure.

This isn’t theoretical. Look at American, Australian, British and New Zealand cities that have been ruled for decades by those who subscribe to this philosophy. Skyrocketing homelessness, spiralling welfare budgets, broken public schools, rampant crime, and disappearing middle classes aren’t accidents, they are features, not bugs. When systems crack under pressure, these strategists don’t back down, they double down. They demand more funding, more redistribution, and less oversight.

The moral sleight of hand is staggering. Reward dysfunction, punish production. Guilt the productive into silence. Pathologize effort. Redefine failure as oppression and success as privilege. Encourage dependence by calling it a right. Then, when people are being raped, abused, killed and drowning, insist that only a bigger parasitic government can pull them out.

What’s truly sinister is the long game, once dependency reaches a tipping point, voting patterns shift. Those receiving become the majority, those producing become the minority, and political power calcifies. You don’t need a coup when you can buy ballots with benefits. It’s the equivalent of building a wall and getting your neighbour to pay for it.

This isn’t just economically unsustainable, it’s spiritually corrosive. It hollows out human character. It strips individuals of agency and incentives. It breeds entitlement in the name of empathy, and bitterness in the name of justice. It destroys the feedback loop that tells us what works and what fails.

They scream at you that all the world needs is more love, but they are unwilling to pay the price or make the sacrifices that true love claims. Its will never be charitable to redistribute other people’s money, labour and earnings, its called theft.

If your goal is to destroy a society, you don’t need to attack it with bombs. Just convince enough people they are victims, reward them for staying that way, and punish those who refuse to participate in the delusion.

That’s the Cloward-Piven Strategy. Not a mistake. Not mismanagement. A plan. One that replaces responsibility with resentment and freedom with a leash. And like all utopian schemes, its path leads not to equality, but to ruin, and inevitably death. From the author.

The opinions and statements are those of Sam Wilks and do not necessarily represent whom Sam Consults or contracts to. Sam Wilks is a skilled and experienced Security and Risk Consultant with 3 decades of expertise in the fields of Real estate, Security, and the hospitality/gaming industry. Sam has trained over 1,000 entry level security personnel, taught defensive tactics, weapons training and handcuffs to policing personnel and the public. His knowledge and practical experience have made him a valuable asset to many organisations looking to enhance their security measures and provide a safe and secure environment for their clients and staff.