It's complicated, yes, but the battle groups forming are not exactly your father's Cold War. ...

Below is an excerpt from American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character tragically, shockingly, angeringly appropriate for Memorial Day. One day, I hope, the sacrifice of these lost American men, too, will be recognized by the nation -- and those responsible for their sacrifice condemned by history.

Note: Cited below is Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., author of Betrayed and Red Cocaine and a kind mentor to me. Sadly, this great patriot passed away at 5pm on May 23, 2014. 

From American Betrayal, Chapter 11:

On May 12, 1945, five days after V-E Day, the AP filed a startling news report from Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF):...

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Imagine a curious soul or two in the not-too-distant future furtively peeling back the layers and learning the cruel truth: that their forbears willingly exchanged all of their precious liberties for tyranny rather than assess and educate and protect themselves against Islamic conquest -- violent, pre-violent, smooth, explosive, financial, political, kafiyya-wrapped or Armani-suited. I think they will marvel because, as they will so very tragically know first-hand, Islam is so simple: its culture of death, its oppression of women and non-Muslims, its defilement of children, its suppression of conscience, religion and speech. They will be astonished, also very angry, over the way free men and women in 20th-21st centuries saw fit, not to embark on emergency measures to ensure energy independence from Islamic oil, block Islamic immigration, and shield financial markets and academia from sharia-compliance,...

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This week's syndicated column:

The National Catholic Register broke the most shocking cultural news of the week:

“A group of students at the University of Notre Dame has generated a campus-wide controversy by advocating that marriage between one woman and one man is better suited for children than same-sex ‘marriage.’”

Welcome to campus controversy 2014, where the subversives are traditionalists and, as we will see, the subversives control the establishment.

The Register continued:

“The group – known as Students for Child Oriented Policy (SCOP) – elicited negative letters to the campus newspaper and prompted hundreds of students to sign a petition calling upon the university not to recognize it as an official campus club.”

What comes next may not be surprising, but it remains gasp-worthy: Notre Dame refused to recognize the group favoring what we now know as “traditional...

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Photo by Paul Avallone

Former Green Beret (including the Afghan War) and photojournalist Paul Avallone just sent me two of his photos emblazoned with a cut from a recent post of mine. My idea of a perfect collaborative effort -- thanks, Paul.

Here's the first:

What Would The Founders Think just published a positive review of American Betrayal by Marcia here. Marcia has now added a "postscript" about The Rebuttal. Aside from the 25 reviews on The Rebuttal's Amazon page (4.6 star rating), this amounts to the first stand-alone review of American Betrayal's unanticipated companion volume.

Martin recently informed this reviewer that Diana West has written a book-length Rebuttal to negative reviews of American Betrayal. That being unusual, it was necessary to read the reviews to discover...

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Your tax dollars at work: Local Afghans watch as Marines with Engineer Platoon, Battalion Landing Team 3/8, Regimental Combat Team 8, remove a bridge and culvert at Kakar village, Helmand province, Afghanistan, March 28, 2011. Residents asked the Marines to build the bridge then asked them to removed it a few days later in the erroneous belief it hindered water flow to their poppy fields. Despite assurances from the engineers that the water was unrestricted, the Marines removed the bridge at local Afghans' insistence in order to maintain the goodwill, trust and confidence the Marines have earned since their arrival. (Photo by Gunnery Sgt. Bryce Piper)

This week's syndicated column

John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan...

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America has a new and, thankfully, living Medal of Honor winner -- Kyle White -- whose bravery is now part of the annals of military history. The battle for which White has been honored was "a textbook ambush," according to the USA Today account, "by an enemy that vastly outnumbered the Americans and their Afghan comrades." Six Americans were killed that day in 2007. The other eight were wounded.

USA Today recounts the incident:  

Fourteen Americans and a squad of Afghan National Army soldiers were attacked while strung out single file along a narrow trail devoid of cover. Scores of Taliban fighters crouched on the opposite side of the valley or were concealed ahead down the trail or on the ridge above. They opened fire at 3:30 p.m. as the setting sun was in the soldiers' eyes. Many of the attackers were in shadows, all but invisible to the Americans.

...

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This review of Ken Burns' 19-part "Jazz" documentary first appeared in The Weekly Standard:

All That Jazz Ken Burns in Black and White Diana West January 15, 2001, Vol. 6, No. 17

Louis Armstrong was a great trumpet player, a major jazz innovator, and a widely beloved entertainer. But was he the Second Coming? This is the hardly exaggerated implication of Ken Burns's Jazz documentary, and it's one well worth pondering -- not for what it says about the great Satchmo, but for what it says about a tightly blinkered view of history and race that has come to dominate the presentation of music in America.

Burns -- who first came to fame with his PBS documentary on the Civil War -- is an admitted musical neophyte. But he found as mentors...

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Rep. Martin Dies, Texas Democrat and founding chairman on the House Committee on Un-American Activities

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In the following two quotations, we see encapsulated the Influence vs. Spying divide, the main topic under consideration in "Influence and the Experts, Part 1" here.

The power to influence policy has always been the ultimate purpose of the Communist Party's infiltration. It was much more dangerous, and, as events have proved, much more difficult to detect, than espionage, which beside it is trivial, though the two go hand in hand.

--Whittaker Chambers

In our more than twenty years of archivally based research on Soviet espionage in America, we have uncovered ample documentation of Soviet intelligence obtaining...

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I did not have -- you know -- and isn't that a bummer?

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This week's syndicated column

Remember that day in 1998 when Bill Clinton’s lewd Oval Office liaisons with an intern named Monica Lewinsky became public knowledge and Bill Clinton thought he was a cooked goose?

He sure looked that way in those early pictures, and he acted that way, too, enlarging the conspiracies he’d already orchestrated to try to obstruct justice in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Before the whole grimy era was technically over, culminating in historic impeachment proceedings, Bill Clinton would engage in suborning perjury, witness tampering and the like – even gulling his own Cabinet members to lie publicly on his behalf – all to save his political hide, which the American people had no intention of tanning.

Sure, he would be found in contempt for intentionally...

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In 2012, the AP apologized for firing war correspondent Edward Kennedy for reporting the end of WWII on May 7, 1945  in defiance of military censors accommodating Stalin's wishes to announce the German surrender on May 8.

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Notice the media huzzas for the 69th anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe? Too bad the date is wrong. We celebrate V-E Day on May 8 due strictly to Stalin's wishes and Truman and Churchill's fear of "offending the Russians" -- the frequent driver, sometimes fueled by bona fide agents of Stalin's influence, of much US and British policy and strategy.

The war in Europe ended on May 7, 1945.

The story, from Chapter 12 of American Betrayal:

...

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Harry Dexter White: senior Treasury official, Soviet agent and agent of influence

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One question I continue to be asked is what motive could possibly have driven the tiny band of anti-American-Betrayal extremists in their "disinformation campaign" -- Jed Babbin's phrase -- against the book (debunked here) and their "mugging"  -- M. Stanton Evans' term -- of me (recently re-imagined by J.R. Nyquist as "a bungled mugging in which the mugger was seriously injured by blows from the victim’s purse").

Having received input from Old Leftists, psychologists, intelligence professionals and others on what still remains a subject of wide and intense consideration, I can say the various theories are fascinating but, naturally, inconclusive.

I would like to address a different vector of criticism that I have to date left mainly unanswered, except for a tangential...

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Selections from a lively mailbag on my most recent syndicated column: "Execrable Harry Reid Is No Joe McCarthy" indicate that outside the punditry and political class at least there are Americans who are familiar with the facts the about Sen. McCarthy.

Go get Em, Ms. West. I have been truly amazed by how many patriotic Americans have swallowed the lies about McCarthy. I am always glad to read one of your articles warning us of the depth and width of infiltration occurring throughout our Federal government. Perhaps Mr. Hanson and others will dig deeper to find the truth, thanks to your persistence. Sincerely,

XXXX

Thank you for standing for truth in answering Victor Davis Hanson's column comparing Harry Reid to Joseph McCarthy. I am old enough...

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James Hodge writes in:

For some reason I cannot trace, I was recently reminded of Byron's poem and this parallel glimmered, so I tried to put it together. ... 

BYRON REDUX The Front Page came down like Montag on a book, And its minority cohorts knew just what it took-- Regardless of whether they had read it or no-- To defame BETRAYAL as the words of a foe. Like the leaves of a cactus or the wings of a pig, The critics were sparse, but tried to seem big. Like the first hasty weeds when the winter has passed, Their magnificent assumption was not fated to last. Like the flight through the air of Odin’s dread spear, The Truth breathed their cowardly hearts full of fear. Their outrage swelled up and then spasmed away, When they saw they could not keep derision at bay. There lay the pretenders, their mouths...

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This week's syndicated column

Dear Victor Davis Hanson,

You suggest in your syndicated column, “Harry Reid: A McCarthy for Our Time,” that we “ask Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the same question once posed to Sen. Joseph McCarthy by U.S. Army head-counsel Robert [sic] N. Welch: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’”

First of all -- that would be Joseph N. Welch, not Robert. Robert W. Welch was someone rather different -- a founder of the John Birch Society. Second, I would like to ask you a question: Are you aware of the context of Joseph N. Welch’s showboating remarks?

M. Stanton Evans did the spadework in Blacklisted by History,...

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Remember how Obama chest-thumped his way through the 2012 campaign as Vanquisher of "al Qaeda"?

Setting aside the absurd and distracting act of branding this entire age of expansionist Islam and jihad as "al Qaeda," the 2014 terrorism report from the State Department confirms what we already read in headlines, from Benghazi to Syria. Obama, having proclaimed from the hustings that Osama bin Laden's killing was, effectively, a jihad-ender, completely demagoged the danger with a line that is now laid bare as phony.

From the executive summary:

Al-Qa’ida (AQ) and its affiliates and adherents worldwide [ie., Islamic jihad] continue to present a serious threat to the United States, our allies, and our interests. While the international community has severely degraded AQ’s core leadership, the terrorist threat has evolved. Leadership losses in Pakistan, coupled...

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