“Michael Lonsdale, actor who played Bond villain in ‘Moonraker,’ dies at 87,” headlined the CNN, report, and other news outlets recalled Lonsdale as Hugo Drax, with Roger Moore as James Bond. Six years earlier, Lonsdale starred in a more realist film, and delivered a line highly relevant for 2020 and beyond.

In the early 1960s, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) sought to prevent Algerian independence and launched a campaign of terror and assassination that claimed some 2,000 victims. Their primary target was Gen. Charles de Gaulle and that caught the attention of Frederick Forsyth. In his 1971 The Day of the Jackal, the OAS tasks a mysterious Englishman, codename “Jackal,” to assassinate the French president.

As Forsyth explained in the novel, the OAS perceived France’s “vast bureaucracies” as a glaring weakness, and that comes through in the film. The Jackal, wonderfully played by Edward Fox, deploys fake identification and clever disguises to elude the French authorities. The government then turns to “the best detective in France,” Claude Lebel, played by Michael Lonsdale.

The sleuth tracks the Jackal to the residence of the elegant Madame de Montpellier, played by Delphine Seyrig. The stone-face Lebel tells her, “be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position,” a warning with lingering relevance for the America of 2020.

Assassins target police officers as they sit in their patrol cars, and mobs chanting “We hope they die!” block entry to the hospital emergency room. An Antifa acolyte guns down the unarmed Trump supporter Aaron Danielson. Mob members assassinate retired St. Louis police officer David Dorn and live-stream the execution. This kind of murderous action is not new.

In 2017, Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson opened fire on a group of Republicans playing baseball. The would-be assassin seriously wounded Rep. Steve Scalise and four others.  If not for quick response by congressional police, it would have been a killing field. For the most part, response from Democrats was feeble, and three years later Democrats fail to condemn the Antifa-Black Lives Matter axis now inflicting violence in cities across the country.

Axis forces attack synagogues and call for a Kristallnacht against Christian churches. Taxpayer-supported National Public Radio takes seriously a book titled In Defense of Looting. A gunman shoots five-year-old Cannon Hinnant in the head, execution style, and the establishment media doesn’t know what to make of it.

In The Hunt, from Universal Pictures, a character speaks of “slaughtering a dozen deplorables.”

As Angelo Codevilla recalls,  the deplorables used to be “racist, sexist, homophobic” types, clinging to God and guns. Today, the ruling class has shifted to “indicting roughly 72 percent of the population as white supremacists, likely violent.”

This previous administration’s Department of Homeland Security produced “Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1979-2008.” This 2012 study classified as “extreme right-wing terrorists” persons it judged to be “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty. ” The same themes emerged in Challengers from the Sidelines: Understanding America’s Violent Far-Right, from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

Consider also Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, an April 2009 paper from a DHS then ruled by former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano. In 2020, surging Marxist hatred and criminal violence underscore Lebel’s warning, as other lessons emerge from the Jackal his own self.

The assassin secures a passport in the name of a deceased person. Decades later, that kind of identity theft was still possible in the United States. As the Diplomatic Security Service of the State Department recently discovered, Mexican national Gustavo Araujo Lerma applied for a U.S. passport under the assumed identity of Hiram Enrique Velez, a deceased U.S. citizen. This enabled Araujo to vote illegally in American elections for more than two decades.

This kind of identity fraud could be easily prevented, but the will to cross-check birth and death records with passport applications appears to be lacking. In the style of 1960s France, America’s vast bureaucracies pose little challenge to modern terrorists.

In 2001, the United States boasted the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which conducts counter-intelligence. With all their assets and massive funding, none of these agencies could stop a group of 19 terrorists, headquartered in caves in Afghanistan, from completing their mission of death and destruction. In 2009, FBI negligence enabled “soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan to murder 13 Americans and wound 42 others at Fort Hood.

As recent attacks on military facilities in Pensacola and Corpus Christi confirm, Islamic jihadists have not given up. As the election approaches, America’s domestic terrorists are certain to ramp up deadly violence. In all places and at all times, be in no doubt as to the seriousness of your position.