As I rebut exhaustively the charges against me and American Betrayal contained in Ronald Radosh's self-decribed "take-down," here is M. Stanton Evans' evisceration of the Radosh's very similar "take-down" of Evans' trail-blazing, exceptional book, Blacklisted by HIstory. 

THE BOOK ON McCARTHY Having been around the block a time or two, I guess nothing should surprise me, but I have to admit I was profoundly shocked by Ronald Radosh’s onslaught against my work — and honor — in what professed to be a review of my new book about Senator Joe McCarthy (“The Enemy Within,” Dec. 17). Had this Radosh effusion appeared in The New Republic ...

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A fine defense by R.S. McCain here in response to Conrad Black's attack at NRO:

(My rapid response to Black here.)

McCain:

National Review has published a column by Conrad Black which calls Diana West’s new book American Betrayal a “farrago of lies,” and I just don’t know what to say, except that (a) Black doesn’t seem to have read West’s book, and (b) is therefore attacking the straw man version of West’s argument, as presented by Ron Radosh.

As are all of the copy-cat attacks.

Stacy McCain's bottom line:

I remain Diana West’s ally in this fight because whatever errors she may have made, from the standpoint of professional historians, she is asking important questions and calling attention to facts that have been too long ignored...

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Yesterday, it was a retired builder. Today, it is a poet.

From Family Security Matters.

by David Solway

The controversy surrounding Diana West's new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nation's Character, that erupted over the last week on the Internet vividly illustrates a point I made, and perhaps belabored, in several recent articles; namely, a radical split is occurring within conservative ranks that threatens its long-term cohesion and presents the liberal/left with a pronounced and supplementary...

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Diana - As a long-time advocate for free speech; long involvement with the International Free Press Society; and as you know, an associate of some of the bravest free speech practitioners in the world, I find the Horowitz/Radosh-led attacks on you to be beneath contempt. For them to pretend to be part of a “freedom” movement (maybe excluding speech?) while acting like school yard bullies, is laughable. I have read your book American Betrayal, cover to cover – and I found myself deeply shaken, somewhat analogous to the day I finished Atlas Shrugged as a young man, the overall feeling one of serious letdown in my history teachers and ‘why have I never heard this before’?  Your sources are there for all to see and your chain of events and conclusions follow them scrupulously. Does that mean that every claim you make and question you raise are necessarily accurate descriptions of the causes of the great historical events? Yet, is this question even important in the raging attacks? I submit that the facts...

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Before I link (below) to a new and spirited defense of me and American Betrayal, an update:

The continuing Rado-Horo super-charged attack machine against a book -- mine -- finds an ally in Andrew Sullivan, and now Mother Jones.

Sullivan, quoted by Mother Jones, is "dismayed how isolated the push-back against the book -- Horowitz and Radosh -- seemed to be on the right," although he did take cheer ("some good news today") in NRO's Conrad Black "review" -- i.e., the latest attack by someone who hasn't read the book.

Over at Tundra Tabloids, Kenneth Sikorski picks...

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Over at Gates of Vienna -- valiant defenders and friends -- a Swede's comment on the war on American Betrayal  made me jump:

I am Swedish, and I have no intention of reading “American Betrayal”. But I didn’t have to read very much of the review of Mr Radosh to conclude that Ms West’s book is a very important and competent work. And it’s obvious that a book with that magnitude is not written by itself.

“How on earth can the man do that?”, is a very relevant question....

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Chairman Mao, murderer of 30, 40 million people at least, hangs in the homes of elites and celebrities, while Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations into the "Amerasia affair" helped reveal the complex influence operation, as M. Stanton Evans writes, that “assiduously worked to guide official and public thinking, and hence the course of U.S. policy” regarding the Far East and the loss of China to Mao's Communists, hangs in the hell of the American imagination.

Something is deeply wrong with this picture.

Call it American Betrayal.

As I can, I will be posting or linking to the many radio interviews I have been doing this week to discuss American Betrayal -- and the war on American Betrayal.

Here are a few of my most recent interviews:

On the Dan Cofall in Dallas-Fort Worth...

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The late Herbert Romerstein (1931-2013) was one of the foremost experts on the Cold War and Soviet penetration in the USA. In this video, he discusses his 2000 book The Venona Secrets, which he wrote with Eric Breindel. In 2012, he and M. Stanton Evans published Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government.

UPDATE: 

Answer: He warned "the ambassador." John Haynes sent me a new page reference from The Sword and the Shield and the Shield -- p. 122, not p. 111 as indicated  -- so I would expect to see the footnote corrected in the Haynes and Klehr article soon.

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John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have posted a new article titled, "Was Harry Hopkins a Soviet Spy?"

There will be more to say about the Hopkins debate in the future, but I would like to call attention to one passage in the Haynes and Klehr article.

Referring to the Mitrokhin archive of KGB documents, they write:

The only new material Mitrokhin provided on Hopkins was a 1943 report that Hopkins had notified the Soviet ambassador in Washington that the FBI had observed a Soviet diplomat meeting covertly with Steve Nelson, who supervised San Francisco area operations of the Communist Party of the United States. 

This...

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Lucky me -- another "collegial" email from Mr. Charm.

Feel the love.

CHAPTER 9

On opening, the National D-day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia—a town that lost more Americans per capita on D-day than any other—unveiled busts of FDR, Truman, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, and Stalin. Stalin’s inclusion sparked anger, editorials, a petition, and, finally, board action to remove all of the leaders from public display. http://www2.newsadvance.com/news/2010/sep/28/d-day-memorial-remove-busts -stalin-other-allied-fi-ar-530016/.

Suvorov, Chief Culprit, xi.

Bohlen, Witness to History, 126.

Suvorov, Chief Culprit, xi.

Suvorov, Chief Culprit, xiii.

Dies, Martin Dies’ Story, 11.

Gen. Mark W. Clark, Calculated Risk (New York: Enigma Books, 2007), 389.

Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! 405–32.

William C. Bullitt, “How We Won the War and Lost the Peace,” Life, August 30, 1948.

...

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Now it's Conrad Black at the NationalReviewOnline/New York Sun who seeks to stop all rational thought about the ideas contained in my book, American Betrayal, this time sinking into potty talk.

New depths.

To attempt to save Roosevelt from new scrutiny as head of a White House effectively maneuvered by confirmed, agents of Soviet influence, Black resorts to calling me: 

a right-wing loopy who has occasionally aroused cautious hopefulness that she has been house-trained ... . The West farrago of lies has been thoroughly debunked, especially by Ron Radosh in his FrontPageMag piece titled “McCarthy on Steroids.”

My rebuttal to Radosh is forthcoming.

Black writes:

Rather than dwelling on the falsehoods of the...

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The bizarro war on American Betrayal doesn't stop. The latest from David Horowitz is that I "should not have written this book."

Who says that?

I will have a lengthy rebuttal to publish in the next few days.

Couldn't let this comment keep sliding, though. One of the mainstays of this surreal assault on my credibility is that I argue without evidence. Or, as David Horowitz says, I make "large claims unsupported by the evidence."

No, I make large claims supported by evidence -- lots of evidence. Here is one chapter's worth of my 900-plus endonotes.

CHAPTER 9

On opening, the National D-day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia—a town that lost more Americans per capita on D-day than any other—unveiled busts of FDR, Truman, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, and Stalin. Stalin’s inclusion sparked anger, editorials, a petition, and, finally, board action to remove all of the leaders from public display. http://www2.newsadvance.com/news/2010/sep/28/d-day-memorial-remove-busts...

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This week's syndicated column

What did I do on my summer vacation?

I stayed home. The family went to the country this week but not me. I stayed behind to deal with a white-hot controversy.

About what?

Me.

Thus, I am now engaged in the painstaking job of rebutting an explosion of falsehoods and distortions about me and my new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character. These attacks began appearing on the Internet last week at several neoconservative websites: first and mainly Frontpage Magazine (FPM), Pajamas Media and American Thinker.

Close to 10 pieces have appeared (more promised), all of them emanations of a 7,900-word book review at FPM that reviewer Ronald Radosh described as a “take-down” in one of his own three follow-up pieces. Two writers who followed suit admitted in print that they hadn’t read the book.

It is important...

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What is particularly pleasing to me about the following comment from my friend and colleague Lars Hedegaard, free speech champion, historian and editor of Dispatch International, is that he originally wrote it to a third party. He kindly agreed to publish it. 

Bonus: Lars has read all of American Betrayal, cover to cover -- as opposed to some people.

Lars wrote:

What Diana West has done is to dynamite her way through several miles of bedrock. On the other side of the tunnel there is a vista of a new past. Of course folks are baffled. Few people have the capacity to take this in. Her book is among the most well documented I have ever read. It is written in an unusual style viewed from the perspective of the historian—but it probably couldn’t have been done any other way.



...

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CLARIFICATION: Below is the rebuttal I provided to American Thinker to defend myself against unsubstantiated allegations against my scholarship on the AT website. Rather than publish the response I submitted in my own defense, editor Thomas Lifson issued editiorial instructions. I told him in response that this is the defense I wish to publish and he has refused.

NOTE: I wrote and submitted the following rebuttal on Saturday evening to American Thinker in response to a review that, while positive in its treatment of my central arguments, parroted many charges against my scholarship based on Ronald Radosh's assertions in his self-described "take-down" of my book at Frontpage Magazine. I am currently and painstakingly rebutting these charges -- and the many insupportable claims against my book in the FPM "review" -- in no small part because they are extremely injurious to my reputation,...

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Over at Ruthfully Yours, lucky-keystroke archive of the positive first review of American Betrayal that Frontpage Magazine removed from its website in July, Ruth King enters the fray to try to explain what many have found inexplicable: Why anti-Communists who once inhabited the Marxist Left would engage in what Radosh, crowingly, called a "take-down" of my book.

From the...

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One of the many,  insupportable   claims Ronald Radosh is making about me and my book in this self-described, continuing "take-down," is that I "attack" historians whose work I cite.

There are no attacks on these historians in my book whatsoever, and I can also prove it (see below). There are  times when I arrive at  different conclusions in my analysis of the evidence, but in my book disagreement does not entail "attack."

I urge people to read American Betrayal  so they can make up their own minds.

Worth recalling...

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As demonstrated chapter, verse and footnote below, the self-described Radosh "take-down" of American Betrayal by Frontpage Magazine is based in large part (one section of five, so 20 percent so far) on a critique of things that are not in my book.

Now let's turn to another aspect of Radosh's credibility. In his "take-down," he writes:

(When I sent her a collegial email questioning this assertion, and requesting that we get together to talk about it, she became huffy. “Dialoguing is one thing,” she emailed back; “issuing directives is another.”)

Really? Is that what happened? On receiving a "collegial" email, I became "huffy"?

Let's check. After all, there's...

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I have submitted this to American Thinker and expect it to be posted. Here is a sneak preview:

In Bernie Reeves’ review of my book, American Betrayal, at American Thinker, he discusses another review, one by Ronald Radosh that appeared at Frontpage Magazine. I will be writing a rebuttal to the Radosh review. In the meantime, however, I would like to address the issue of scholarship that both reviews raise. The subject is bandied about in these two reviews. Indeed, scholarship is perhaps the main complaint they both raise about the book: i.e., that I have none. Radosh writes, for example, that I do “not know how to evaluate the reliability of a source or assess the evidence produced.” Also, that I disregard “the findings of the sources she does rely on when they contradict her yellow journalism conspiracy theories.” Since American Betrayal contains 900-plus endnotes, that’s a lot of sources that I allegedly do not know how to evaluate and also disregard. Is it true? Is Ronald Radosh...

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Some of the latest media about American Betrayal.

Review: "The Hard Truth about the Cold War," Jeff Minick, Smoky Mountain News here

Review: "Reds Under the Beds" by Bernie Reeves at American Thinker here.

"Conservative Historian Has Interesting Ideas" New York magazine here.

American Power Blog: "David Horowitz and Ron Radosh Attack Diana West and  American Betrayal here.

Stacy McCain: "Diana West Dissed by David Horowitz?" here

Review: "Facts and Implications" by JE Dyer at The Optimistic Conservative here.

Review: "The 80-Year Sellout of America" by Wes Vernon at Renew America here.

Discussing American Betrayal with Accuracy in Academia here.

...

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Here are the five parts of a series based on American Betrayal that appeared at Breitbart.com last week.

Why FDR Fail to Relieve MacArthur and 151,000 Troops Fighting the Japanese in the Philippines?

Did the Roosevelt Administration Send Uranium and Other Atomic Materials to Stalin?

Did Communist Influence Prolong WWII by Blocking German Resistance Efforts?

Did Communist Influence Lead to D-Day Invasion over Italy Strategy?

...

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Here are the four pieces I have written to date about the fate of American Betrayal at Frontpage.

American Betrayal: Purged at Frontpage

If Frontpage Will Lie About This, What Won't They Lie About

If Frontpage Lies About This, They'll Lie About Anything, Pt. 2

"Professor Radosh Gets an "F"

Note to readers.

In just one of today's installments of the Smear Me Show at Frontpage, Radosh tells readers that an episode he criticized in his original "review," and that I flagged yesteday for not being in the book, is in the book -- and in three places.

This is a lie, too.

But it gets worse. First, he has to swap the first episode (not in book) for a new one (also not in book), and hope no one notices.

I noticed.

His original episode (still not in book) relates that "George Elsey found confidential files in the Map Room that showed FDR naively thinking he could trust Stalin, and instructed Hopkins to tell Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front in 1942."

Remember: Elsey, Map Room,...

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This week's syndicated column

NOTE: This is the third in an occasional series on the truth-tellers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (St. Martin's Press).

One point I try to convey when speaking to audiences about my new book, "American Betrayal," is the inspiration of the truth-tellers.

These are the men and women who refused to stay silent and thus enable the "betrayal" the book lays out -- engineered by a de facto Communist "occupation" of Washington by American traitors loyal to Stalin and, even more heartbreaking, largely covered up by successive U.S. administrations and elites.

The reason I take pains to bring these truth-tellers to light is that they remain lost to our collective memory, even as much confirmation of their truth-telling has become public record.

This means we are overdue for a major historical correction.

Our historical compass still erroneously indicates that the great Red hunters of the 1940s and 1950s were engaged in "witch hunts" for Communist spies who were figments of feverish imaginations. But these spies were real, all right, and hundreds of them have been identified.

...

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This is the fifth and final part in a series at Breitbart.com based on the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West. On March 3, 1945, under prodding from both the senior US military commander and US ambassador in Moscow, FDR cabled Stalin to request “urgently” that provisions be made for ten American rescue crews to move in and out of Soviet-captured territories to evacuate liberated American prisoners or war, many of whom required medical attention. With uncharacteristic punch, FDR underscored his request as being “of the greatest importance.”

On March 5, 1945, Stalin replied: Nyet. There were no groups of American ex-POWs in the Red zone, so no flights necessary. The Soviets would tell the British...

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Edward Cline, who reviewed American Betrayal here, weighs in on the Radosh hit piece at Rule of Reason.

"Frontpage Spitballs Strike Diana West"

by Edward Cline

There is a firestorm occurring on FrontPage over a purported review of Diana West's American Betrayal: The Assault on Our Nation's Character, written by Ronald Radosh. Radosh penned a "review" which questioned the reasoning and scholarship of West's contention that...

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I would like to salute the contributions made in the comment-trenches in response to the recent eruptions over American Betrayal. It is interesting to note that the Frontpage cadre, led by chief enforcer David Horowitz, finds it hard to believe that so many people would take to the comment sections, Facebook, blogs and elsewhere wholly unsolicited by me and oppose their ugly attempts to render certain research, certain arguments unacceptable inside boundaries of historical debate as they, themselves, set them.

The Wall is going to come down no matter what they do to shore it up.

Meanwhile, on somewhat closer scrutiny, I find the Radosh mess to be a series of flattened, screaming, straw-man arguments that fail in terms of the most basic intellectual honesty to convey any reality-based synopsis of the evidence assembled inside the pages of my book.

For example, Radosh has readers believing that my quite lengthy, sourced discussions of whether Harry Hopkins, FDR's top wartime advisor,...

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New York Times front page on June 5, 1944, the day before D-Day

This is the fourth in a series in five parts at Breitbart.com based on the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West. The two most ardent boosters of the Normandy invasion were Stalin and Harry Hopkins.

At this point in this series, the combination should prompt at least a second look at the strategy. The heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of all the Allied forces in Normandy stand undimmed, but the question becomes to whose end was the invasion launched – ours or Stalin’s?

Before laying out some clues to the answer, it’s worth noting that the conventional understanding of the Normandy invasion – the “long-awaited invasion” of the European continent to open the “long-awaited second front” – perpetuates some of Stalin’s most pernicious disinformation. British and American forces had already invaded Europe (Sicily, Italy) long before the Normandy invasion. Churchill famously urged that the advance on Germany continue from already-won bases in Italy and elsewhere in south-central Europe.

...

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I have not had time to respond to the massive hit piece against my book American Betrayal posted today at Frontpage.com.

I will.

I would like to point out in brief, however, the simple, lowdown mendacity of the "Editors' note" -- that would be editors David Horowitz, Jamie Glazov, perhaps others -- that tops 7,000 words of misrepresenting, twisting, and omitting by Ronald Radosh passed off as a "review."

(This is the Radosh m.o., by the way, as briliiantly exposed in 2008 by M. Stanton Evans.)

Here it is:

Editors’ note: Frontpage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh’s points below. She refused.

To say that this misrepresents the truth is one of those understatements of the year.

...

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This is the third in a series of five parts at Breitbart.com based on the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West. For many Americans, the first inkling of an anti-Nazi German resistance movement came in the movie Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise. The 2008 movie dramatized the German underground conspiracy headed by Count Claus von Stauffenberg to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.

This star-crossed plot was not only a colossal failure, it was also the anti-Nazi German resistance’s last gasp. In its aftermath, Hitler executed hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-Nazi Germans.

What is less well known--what is not taught to us--is that there was much more to this anti-Nazi movement. Its leaders inside military, clergy, and political circles made multiple attempts through multiple emissaries on behalf...

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I always enjoy my interviews with Rev. David Stokes, who kindly invited me to his church in May for a Q & A about American Betrayal, which is available to watch here.

In our latest discussion on the radio, we take off on "Who Really Won the Cold War?" and why this isn't just history and why it directly relates to the fact -- face it, America -- we're losing badly today.

The answer, not surprisingly, has to do with more and deeper American Betrayal.

The interview is here.

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Follow me @diana_west_

 





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Was Harry Hopkins working for FDR -- or Stalin?

This is the second in a series in five parts at Breitbart.com based on the new book, "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character" (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West. Pt. 1 is here. It’s difficult to imagine someone more important in U.S. history than Harry Hopkins, but Americans don’t learn much more than his name, if that, in school.

This means we aren’t taught that Hopkins, FDR’s top wartime advisor, ran what became known as “Roosevelt’s own personal Foreign Office” from the Lincoln Bedroom, where Hopkins lived for three-and-half-years. We aren’t taught that this former social worker in key ways controlled U.S. foreign policy by controlling the distribution...

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Bataan Death March, 1942: Did this have to happen?

The following begins a series at Breitbart News in five parts based on questions that arise from integrating revelations of intelligence history – specifically, the influence on US policy-making by Americans acting on the Kremlin’s behalf-- into the well-known sequence of World War II events. These questions are discussed and documented extensively in the new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press) by Diana West.

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. It is...

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Mark Langfan writing at IsraelNationalNews.com advances a plausible theory that it is not a CIA gun-running pipeline to Al Qaeda that the Obama administration is stonewalling on Benghazi, but rather an Iranian attack on a CIA gun-running pipeline to Al Qaeda instead.

Larry Johnson made a similar case last October.

Worth remembering also is Obama's selection of Thomas Pickering, an Iran apologist, to conduct the State Department's "investigation."

Langfan wonders why Obama administration is gagging CIA survivors of the Benghazi attack.

Is it to cover-up the fact that Obama was running guns to the Syrian rebels? Why do that? Both the then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and then-CIA Director Petraeus were openly advocating arming the Syrian rebels.

Is it such a big deal that the United States was secretly arming enemies of Iran's puppet Assad through our NATO-ally, Turkey? No it isn't.

Is the the fact that some of the US weapons may have accidentally...

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A wonderful, thoughtful review from Wes Vernon this week at Renew America.

A couple of excerpts:

Columnist Diana West has managed to cram into 355 pages the names, dates, and places for the 80-years-long parade of lies and treason foisted on America. For now, that demarcation would specify from 1933 to 2013 with no sign of a letup any time soon. Likely the author would not quibble with those who would roll the starting gate back to 1913, with Woodrow Wilson and the first "progressives" rounding out an even century, but 80 years of the deceit will suffice between a mere two book covers. In American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, Ms. West's well-established reputation for lacking "sacred cows" remains intact. The resulting beneficiaries are the readers, especially those...

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