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June 4, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:25:25

4111 The Communist Subversion of America | Diana West and Stefan Molyneux

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	Hi, everybody. Stefan Molyneux.
	I hope you're doing well. I am beyond pleased to bring to you Diana West.
	Now, she is an author and a researcher and so on, and she's written some fantastic books.
	We're going to link to them below. The first is called The Death of the Grown-Up, How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
	No pressure. And what we're going to talk about today, American Betrayal, The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character.
	Her website is dianawest.net.
	And Twitter is twitter.com forward slash Diana Underbar West Underbar.
	Remember that second underbar or you just can't find her.
	Diana, thank you so much for taking the time today.
	Wonderful to be with you, Stefan.
	So, I have an audience that's fairly friendly to revisionist history, but this is going to be a combination, I think, of Nagasaki and Krakatoa when it comes to examining the history of leftist, socialist, communist infiltration.
	We're going to detonate the myth of the Good War.
	We're going to talk about the Cold War.
	We're going to talk about higher education, aka commie indoctrination, and Wow, what a book it is.
	It is very detailed, very accessible, very powerful, and I really want to thank you for what must have been a blinding amount of research and gathering, and of course for the storms that you've taken since putting the book out.
	But I'd like to start with something that you mentioned in the book a little personal, about Your father, because for a lot of people, it's kind of confusing as to why someone like yourself or myself might be very interested in these topics.
	And yes, there's very good moral cases to be made as to why we should focus on these topics.
	But sometimes I think it's a personal spark that gets the ball rolling.
	And you mentioned about your father in the book.
	Thank you very much for that kind introduction.
	And yes, let's explode some bombs.
	And how nice to start with my father.
	My father, Elliot West, who's also a writer, is a novelist and a television screenwriter.
	He was a soldier who was part of the Normandy invasion.
	He was someone who walked ashore onto Omaha Beach because he arrived on D-Day plus two.
	And he was always very intent on saying D-Day plus two, not D-Day.
	His big fighting, very big fighting, started at the Battle of San Lo sometime later.
	And his war was essentially bookended by the great Normandy invasion.
	He was wounded in the Battle of San Lo and returned to battle and spent a good deal of time crossing the continent to catch up with his group.
	Who had moved on very far ahead, he ended up finding them just over the German border in a little town called Munchau.
	And Munchau is a very important point in my family history because it was there in the winter of 1944 where my father, wearing his summer issue uniform still from the June-July fighting and August fighting and so on, He got pneumonia. He came up with a temperature so high that the protocol was to pull him off the line.
	And very shortly after he was safely behind lines being ill, this was the beginning of the final German breakout in Europe that we know as the Battle of the Bulge.
	And his group, which was a scouting and reconnaissance group in very far ahead, took severe casualties.
	And so it was one of those happenstances whereby he survived and thereby started a family and thereby, a little while later, we're having this conversation.
	But I look at that part of his war, his fighting war, bookended by Normandy and then shortly before the Battle of the Bulge, and what do I find in this very unexpected...
	Rabbit hole of research that I found myself on.
	I found myself coming to the conclusion that neither of these two battles, and the Ardennes-Forest battle of course being the most serious casualties that America took in the entire war, either theater, were necessary.
	I remember talking to my editor at St.
	Martin's Press about some of the things I was discovering.
	And we were still looking around for a title.
	And I was talking about this betrayal.
	This is an American betrayal.
	He said, that's it. That's it.
	This is American betrayal.
	And indeed, the title fits.
	And we can start to explore however you would like what the mechanism of this betrayal was that would lead me to such an extravagant and controversial conclusion.
	Yeah, it is strange. When I was reading your book, I was trying to cast my mind back in time to figure out where I first started with this perspective, which has cost me a lot over the years.
	I think it's given me a lot of benefits and clarity, but that clarity comes with the cost.
	It's like cleaning your own eyes with Windex.
	I was thinking about this.
	My mother actually was born in the mid to late 1930s in Germany.
	My family suffered enormously under the Nazi regime.
	And one story she told me, she didn't speak much of the war, but one story she told me, Diana, was that when the Russians came to the town that she was, and some family members were hiding in, she had to, as a child, flirt with him.
	And I don't even want to know what that meant, but she had to flirt with him in order to get him not to shell...
	I was born in Ireland, but I grew up in London.
	And this was a time of very large pride and very powerful national pride over the Battle of Britain, over the Second World War, and so on.
	But I do remember being enormously confused at the time by the basic dual policy of let's destroy the totalitarian nightmare known as Nazi Germany, but let's send lots of food and money to the Soviet Empire.
	And I just remember thinking, even as a kid, I'm like, well, that doesn't seem to add up.
	Very much. And as I sort of began to research and read about this a little bit more, I did begin to get this uneasy feeling that there was this kind of matrix of communism that we were all plugged into, where every piece of information we got was sifted through the Central Committee for the expansion of the revolution of the proletariat, and we were only allowed to get that which fed Pro-communist or pro-Soviet propaganda and that the conflict between the Soviets and the Nazis was more akin to a mafia turf war than it was good versus evil.
	And I think – so for me, it kind of came out of family as well, just little scraps and stories that sort of set me on this path.
	And so when you did mention in the book about personal stuff, I was like, ah, I think that's kind of – and I sort of want to put that in context for people because – You know, if you look at the opening of something like Saving Private Ryan and you imagine yourself there or your son there or your brother or your father, and then you begin to question what the purpose of it was, what it was actually serving, why it was France and not Africa or Italy or some other way in.
	We'll get to that in a sec, but when you start to look at the horrors of the Second World War and begin to wonder whether or not what you've been told is true or not, It's a very, very chilling moment and I just want to invite people to put on a sweater because we're going to chill the crap out of them today.
	Right. Well, once you get away from what we might call court history, history told to burnish the victors, once you get away from the conventional wisdom that's repeated and repeated and you actually go back to the original sources,
	the documents that were made at the time by the State Department, the newspapers, The memoirs that came spilling out of high-level participants immediately after the war and piecing together a very different story,
	on top of which we come to perhaps what is the original revelation of the swamp in Washington, D.C., which would be when the Republicans come into office in the late 40s, take power in Congress, and start looking back at The past 12 to 16 years of democratic administrations, first FDRs, four terms, which were completed by Truman, and then Truman's additional term.
	And they started to understand the extent to which Washington DC, our institutions of power, related institutions, had been infiltrated by communists.
	And we have been trained in our generation and generations above us and below us have been trained to regard that period of this ghastly revelation and attempt to get their arms around it.
	Because of course this was all secret.
	It was covert. These were hardened operators who did not appear to be communist agents.
	They appeared to be regular old bureaucrats and officials.
	We have been trained to regard that period as the Red Scare.
	We are also trained to regard anyone who wants to examine it as some kind of a kook, as a red-baiter.
	That's another word that we can find parallels today, I believe, in the word Islamophobe.
	Or you can say alt-right or far-right.
	It's a label, not an argument or an examination.
	It's designed to scare people away from an examination of the evidence.
	Exactly. It's supposed to end the conversation.
	And it successfully does in 99% of the time.
	Once you actually get to that place and start peeling this onion, the revelation is overwhelming.
	And I would say that the way I wrote the book, which is a first-person book, it's not a voice of God history or anything like that, truly is the way I came to these different levels of understanding, if you will, or exposure.
	One clue led to another.
	And suddenly you've overturned all of the history that we are all taught and know.
	And I would say that I was certainly schooled in looking at the good war, in being terribly proud with the way the war was conducted.
	And I will say at the same time, I am still filled with awe and amazement at the sacrifice of millions of good people trying to save their country, save the world without any understanding That the elites here, the officialdom in every capital, and this would be not just Washington, this would be London, this would be Berlin, this would be Tokyo, this would be everywhere, France.
	Everywhere was subject to this remarkable penetration by Soviet intelligence and their Agents, fellow travelers, dupes, and so on in these different countries, some of whom very conscious, some were unconscious.
	However, the networks were of great depth and breadth and truly, brilliantly executed in their missions.
	And we know this now.
	We know, we have confirmed 500 agents in Washington have been confirmed.
	We also know from many defectors, and these would be people who reached very high levels inside the different government departments, the State Department, Alger Hiss.
	Most people know the name Alger Hiss, but he was one of scores.
	We think about that. We also know about the magnificent Cambridge ring, five.
	Five, Kim Philby being the most famous, five of them are considered part of that ring.
	We're talking 500. I mean, when you think of the magnitude of what these people could do, not in terms of stealing secrets.
	This is another fallacy that we are subject to today when we try to look back.
	It's not about stealing secrets.
	It's about influencing policy.
	It's about making strategy.
	It's about promoting or protecting another agent or asset.
	So when you start to understand, and we understand more and more about how bureaucracies subvert our constitution Read the paper today, and yesterday, in the past couple of years, people I think have come to a new understanding of this, vis-a-vis the swamp and all the rest.
	You start to get a sense of how policy-making and war strategy can be hijacked.
	And when you look at the map after World War II, and you see suddenly what it took 40 years for Ronald Reagan to call the evil empire, suddenly has expanded into half of Europe, We're about to watch in the next several years the fall of nationalist China and the rise of Mao's communist China and all the subsequent revolutions to come.
	You start to realize that there's another way of looking at victory in World War II and the Cold War, and it doesn't resound to our benefit.
	I mean, I've made the case for many years that ideologically the West lost the war.
	Absolutely. The alliance, and Solzhenitsyn pointed this out, that the recognition of the two big dates that he talked about, 1933 and 1941, the recognition of Russia as a legitimate country when it was just a gangster starvation torture chamber, and then the alliance with Russia that there is a price to be paid for compromises with evil.
	So let's go right back to the beginning.
	Well, not to the very beginning, because that's 1848, but we'll sort of skip a little bit there.
	But there are sort of three layers.
	So the first layer is the popular thing.
	Oh, it was just, oh, you saw bugaboos was the word.
	Bugaboos. I mean, this is something that you would, it's the name for a child's toy.
	It's not the name for a totalitarian ideology that slaughtered 100 million people.
	But there was bugaboos, there was red baiting, there was the McCarthyism, the baiting and attack upon innocent people who, you know, were just curious about life and wanted to wander in the woods of ideology and so on.
	Now, you go below that level and people say, okay, well, McCarthy, you know, the Venona Project has proved there was hundreds.
	He was right. And it was even worse than he thought and so on.
	But basically, it started in the mid to late 1930s after the communists recognized or were subject to reprisals from Hitler's Germany.
	Then they fled to America.
	They infiltrated education.
	They infiltrated state departments and so on.
	But you say that that's still a layer above where the genuine origins of all of this were.
	That may be considered even a second or a third wave relative to what was happening in the teens and 20s.
	Absolutely. And I've learned more since the book came out.
	I've continued my research.
	No, I can't take any more. I just wanted to let you know.
	I can take the book and I'm here.
	I'm fully here. No, just kidding.
	Go ahead. Fine. I need a crash helmet, that's all.
	And then we can go on. Okay, ready.
	Well, interestingly enough, you mentioned Joe McCarthy.
	The author of the great book on Joseph McCarthy, Blacklist by History, by M. Stanton Evans, was for me a revelation in terms of understanding, learning how Stan Evans was able to overturn all of the false history about Joseph McCarthy by going back to the record.
	Indeed, this was my model.
	So I thought, well, it didn't start there.
	It had to go before.
	And, you know, I ended up with a very large canvas, beginning through the McCarthy years specifically.
	It was like a door.
	A door opened, and you can go and start playing around the rest of history in the same way.
	And sorry, just to bungee in for a sec, but what also I found remarkable about Joseph McCarthy was how despised he was by the intellectual elites, but how loved and worshipped he was by the American people.
	People lined up to visit his grave.
	He was, what, the fourth most admired American scholar.
	At the time, people just loved him.
	And so it sort of reminds me of the Trump phenomenon where people are like, oh, he can't possibly win, like so out of touch.
	The two Americas, the America of the working people and the middle class and so on, and then these elites who are really sort of tacking in the exact opposite direction of the general population.
	That's so true. It's absolutely true.
	But what I was going to say, and part of the reason I continue researching is that when Stan Evans passed away, regrettably, In 2015, he left me a good chunk of his archives, his books and hearings, congressional hearings, House Un-American activities, committee hearing, bound hearings. Some of them had actually belonged to James Giuliano, who was one of McCarthy's researchers, which is kind of an amazing legacy to own.
	One of the things that was on the top of a pile was a set of hearings in the 1950s into education, into the subversion of education.
	And I learned from that how far back this really did go.
	And I would just give you one marker, which would be 1940.
	In New York State, there were some excellent hearings undertaken by the New York State Legislature.
	500! 500!
	Sorry, I couldn't say 500.
	This is a whole new set.
	This is New York State we're talking about, where they discovered in 1940, in the window of the Nazi-Soviet pact, when you could actually consider communism to be a threat doctrine.
	After alliance in 1941, you could not.
	But there was this window, and a committee called Rapp Kuder, I'm not sure how you say it, looked into it, discovered that The city colleges of New York City were filled with communist instructors.
	The high schools, the teachers union, all the rest of it, it was done.
	1940. That's before we get any of the Frankfurt School online in terms of being translated and in terms of You know, entering our communication networks and the rest of it.
	And this was the area where it was the 500 teachers that were submerged into the underground, that their ties to the communists were hidden.
	Is that the right area?
	Yes. Although I believe that would have been a wider map as well, not just in New York State.
	But, you know, you learn about the techniques.
	You learn about that it only, you know, you say, oh, well, 500, there must be 50,000 teachers.
	Well, you learn when you actually read about communist techniques, how they do it.
	You learn that it starts with one, and then there's two, and then all of a sudden a meeting is hijacked.
	You learn about their techniques of waiting until the end of the meeting when everyone else has gone home to pass the actual rules and so on.
	You learn how PTA to...
	Larger and more formal venues are taken over by very tiny little cadres.
	And this is something, again, that people don't understand because they are taught by the scholars that, oh, the Communist Party was always insignificant, such a small minority group.
	Well, for one thing, they were absolutely exponentially expanded by the front groups and the different sort of, quote, united front groups that they were able to sort of And also that's how they work.
	And that's how they worked in the Soviet Union as well.
	The Bolshevik party was the tiny party.
	It wasn't very many people compared to population, compared to political system, etc.
	So this is how they do it.
	And what we don't understand is they did it here.
	When we think about the Cold War, most Americans think about it in terms of a war that was waged on chessboards and battlefields somewhere else.
	Didn't happen here.
	And what I've come to understand better is that essentially the communist slash left in this country, what they were able to do over decades, some decades, was eviscerate and eliminate our concept of internal security.
	They took away our understanding.
	For example, when you swear your oath to the Constitution, You are protecting against enemies, foreign and domestic.
	Well, we don't have a concept of domestic enemies anymore.
	The idea of a subversive is a funny, laugh-line word.
	What's so subversive about someone who wants to overthrow the Constitution by violent or stealthy means?
	It was eliminated in a very purposeful way Through the campaigns, information warfare against the House on American Activities Committee, which opens its doors formally in 1938.
	Later, we see sort of companion committees in the Senate, a government operations committee, the Senate internal security subcommittee, and so on, that were targeted for destruction.
	And indeed, I'd say by the end of the 1960s, you know, a decade after McCarthy's death, which did terrible damage to the whole idea That communists perhaps should not hold federal jobs on the taxpayers' dime.
	This became absolutely a ridiculous thing to think after McCarthy.
	But then over the next decade, the entire notion that we had to worry about the government as a sensitive place where people who are beholden to foreign governments or foreign ideas should work, all went by the way.
	And it became very hard To protect ourselves.
	And here we are.
	It's the big lie. It's the big lie.
	And as you point out, looking back to people like George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells and Webb, the Fabians, who were considered to be, I don't know, like just dilettante intellectuals who just, you know, mouthed off about class conflict and so on.
	But they actually laid, it feels almost like we've had train tracks laid out for us.
	And we think we have choice, but we kind of laid out in these train tracks of ideology that have been put there and not talked about.
	And everyone thinks they're making choices.
	But as the old saying goes, if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care about the answers.
	And if you can't even see, what is a vast conspiracy to undermine the freedoms of the West, to destroy the remnants of the free market, to take away the rule of of law to take away basic biological and scientific facts, to take away history, to take away pride, to take away culture.
	These tracks were laid pretty early and our inability to see them means that we think we're wondering at will, but we're actually kind of just trundling along a pre-arranged path.
	Yes, yes, we are trundling along and I think that that's why it becomes so provocative to have this kind of a discussion for people who are very vested In keeping us trundling along.
	And it's been quite an education to me in terms of watching who are putting up these kinds of obstacles simply to getting closer to the facts, to expanding knowledge, not constricting it.
	And so when you look at where we are today in terms of looking back on the Cold War, we're supposed to think it's all over if we understand that the Rosenbergs stole the atomic Bomb.
	Alger Hiss stole a few secrets.
	And there we are.
	And we won. We won the Cold War.
	We won World War II. Hooray!
	And it absolutely, that sounds simplistic, but that is essentially what will get you through AP U.S. history today.
	I mean, this is what's so extraordinary.
	When you go back and you realize the Roosevelt White House was penetrated by Soviet agents to a point, I argue, Metaphorically speaking, of occupation in the sense that there were so many people whose loyalty was to Stalin,
	not to this country, at such high levels that of course policy-making, of course then war-making even more catastrophically, was advantageous in so many instances to the furtherance of the Soviet communist one-world totalitarian project.
	And this is just something that is horrifying to people to understand.
	And I understand that.
	It was horrifying to research.
	I have to say, my daughters were young, going in high school, when I was doing most of the research and writing of this book.
	And so I was getting up very, very early in the morning to start.
	I like to write in the dark of morning.
	And so I was reading and learning these things at a very bleak point in the day.
	And it was horrifying.
	I was alone. It was silent.
	It's dark. It was horrifying, but it was also fascinating.
	And the thing that I do, I can use the word, almost enjoy about it or that's exciting about this kind of writing and research is everything starts to make sense.
	You were talking about at the very beginning about how could this, how did this dysfunction just predominate in terms of bad Nazi, good communist, it starts to make sense.
	And that in a sense becomes, I think, the compulsion To try to make more sense because I do not believe we can get anything right, in other words, survive or try to survive, until we understand that we've been learning the wrong lessons from the past.
	If everything about the past is essentially a lie or a distortion or even more dangerous, an omission, And that's where we're drawing our lessons of how to conduct ourselves today.
	We are doomed. Well, nobody creates this elaborate deception without knowing exactly what the purpose is.
	I mean, the amount of human hours poured into creating this deception.
	People don't just expend that kind of effort for fun.
	You know, it is with a definite purpose.
	And I, you know, it's funny because reading this book as well helped me sort of look back, particularly my somewhat career in academia.
	I remember being on the debating team.
	First year, I was on the debating team and the school flew my debating partner, myself, out to Newfoundland and we were I was engaged in some debates and a guy walked in, you know, the usual pear-shaped, scruffy, half-beard doofus who has these kinds of – and he had a little pin there of Karl Marx, just right there, right there in the open.
	Karl Marx, right? And I was enraged.
	I was – and I just – I turned on – and this was in front of everyone.
	And I turned on him like, how dare you?
	How dare you wear something like that in a debate club?
	Do you think that Marx debated?
	Do you think that Marxist societies allow for the kind of freedoms that you have here?
	I really went to town on the guy because I found it.
	And I just remember people looking at me like I was insane.
	You know, like I was batting away a giant bee that only I could see.
	And I remember thinking, like, how is that?
	Like, if they come in with a pin of Hitler, I mean, people would be all over this guy.
	But Marx... I mean, higher death count than the Nazis.
	More than two times the death count of the Nazis.
	And this guy is just wandering around.
	And then when I was in university, I was taught by an out-and-out Marxist, who I battled with intellectually.
	And people were like, why is he fighting?
	Like, why does he fight? Like, it's just some weird personal...
	Obsession, you know, that we use this obsession.
	Red baiting. You're paranoid.
	You're seeing commies in the jam jar and that kind of stuff.
	And that is an astonishing...
	I mean, to ignore the pile of bodies to the point where you can have these kinds of perspectives.
	And I remember when I was going through college just thinking, wow, I'm, you know, I was recognized as very talented.
	And, you know, my very first essay was read out to the class as an example of a perfect essay.
	But... Just getting more and more headway.
	You know, the salmon can only jump up a waterfall so high.
	And I just remember feeling like, okay, well, is it because I'm kind of pro-free market?
	Is it because I'm a small government kind of guy?
	And now I sort of recognize that, yeah, there was kind of a commie pushback going on in a lot of ways.
	And until you, you know, if you're black and you experience racism...
	You kind of know what the score is.
	You may not be able to battle it as effectively as you like, but you kind of know what's going on.
	But this thing is much more subtle, this resistance to anybody who's an out-and-out critic of communism.
	It is just a kind of, well, we're going to step aside and let you twist in the wind, and then we're going to gently mock you in front of other people to provoke the laughter of the idiot masses.
	And it's just like, but the 100 million dead, does nobody care?
	So it would seem.
	I mean, look at just this past week or so, you had the president of the European Union Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, going to Marx's birthplace for the 200th birthday celebration and giving a speech praising Marx.
	I mean, this...
	That was a head-exploding event for me.
	And that's not a good sign because it means they're very confident in their power and positions.
	Exactly. And the other thing I would say is that it raised very little dust.
	You know, there were some curious, oh, what a curiosity, what an odd story.
	Interesting, look at the statue, haha, of Cold War.
	We thought it was over.
	I mean, it was very low-key, the whole thing, in terms of generating any kind of Outrage, or not outrage even, but just understanding of what the significance of that truly is.
	And this is where you want to get more understanding of how misled and betrayed we have been in terms of the kinds of leadership we have had, in terms of the education we have had, in terms of the manipulation that we've been subject to With all of this.
	And I mean, you get back to, you know, people, I mean, I can imagine people who are listening and watching us are wondering, well, what does this mean?
	What does this mean, these kinds of general discussions?
	When you get to the Roosevelt White House and you look at his top aides, Lachlan Curry, a Soviet agent whose portfolio became China.
	This was extremely important in the fall of China, ultimately.
	His most senior, most aide, unconfirmed Svengali, or not a Svengali exactly, but certainly a co-president he was called.
	I'm talking about Harry Hopkins.
	Harry Hopkins was one of the most fascinating American figures you know nothing about in terms of having successfully vanished from history books.
	If you go back, and I did, I looked in the AP, my daughters were taking AP US, I'd never been taught much about him.
	Oh, a new dealer, very skinny guy off in the pictures.
	This man ran Washington DC, and when you go back and you look at it, you realize how important he was, particularly with an ailing FDR. FDR was physically weak for the entire presidency.
	It got worse and worse and worse.
	Harry Hopkins lived in the White House for three years during World War II. There is much evidence indicating he was an agent of influence for Stalin.
	It's something to discuss and debate and examine, but very senior experts Including a very solid gold defector named Gordievsky, who worked in place for British intelligence for many years,
	a defecting colonel from the KGB, came out with a story about Hopkins having been considered by senior spymaster in the Soviet Union, who was teaching other KGB recruits that Harry Hopkins was the most important agent Moscow had in Washington during the entire war.
	That man was responsible for more decision-making than anyone else but Roosevelt himself.
	How does that disappear from our comprehension of the war, from our assessment looking back at the war?
	That's the kind of thing you have to start working back into the narrative.
	And what I discovered, because another question I've gotten before is, You know, how many books have been written on World War II and the Cold War?
	What are you adding to this?
	And it basically was...
	Another thing we like to call the truth.
	Well, it was a specific mechanism of coming at the truth, which was you had a whole archive full or library full of books about Soviet intelligence, particularly from the 90s forward, where you start getting Compilations of the KGB cables that had been decrypted, the Venona records, later the Matrokin archive, another one later on, the Basile of notebooks, and so on.
	What I discovered, this was all about the same period and after, the 40s forward, really.
	What I discovered, though, was that none of these revelations, which were really confirmations of what people already knew.
	I mean, this was actually not new stuff.
	This was confirming what The investigators, the congressmen, the senators, the defectors, and so on, had actually, you know, with their sweating blood, had actually put out for us, for the most part, it was confirmation.
	But what I discovered was that nobody, I mean, you can almost say nobody, pretty much nobody, had ever taken that information about these main players, the people who made policy, who made the war, and put it back into the more or less Regular history, the biographies, the military histories, diplomatic histories, and so on.
	And so I used to play a game. I still do.
	When I go to the bookstore, a bookstore, you look in the latest biography of Eisenhower, for example, and you don't find any record of the kinds of things I'm writing about in the book or Yalta.
	You don't find any discussion of Alger Hiss having been a Soviet agent, for example.
	You just find The front story.
	You never find the backstory.
	And when you knit the two together, and you essentially put little red beanies on all the spies who are sitting there in the room, everything looks very different.
	Everything looks very different.
	And that's essentially what American Betrayal is, is that knitting together of the intelligence history Well, so let's dive into one of those that I found particularly powerful, which is the Lend-Lease Program, which you described as, you know, the greatest mail-order catalogue in the history of mankind.
	The traditional idea, of course, the Lend-Lease Program, it's generally talked about with regards to England, right?
	That America sent a bunch of stuff over to England to help with the war effort and so on.
	The fact that, untold, Millions and millions of dollars, probably tens or hundreds of millions, who knows, right?
	Huge amounts of military hardware went to the Soviet Union, enabling them to sweep into Germany and basically capture Eastern Europe.
	And at the same time as America was starved for war materials and was facing losses as a result.
	So on what conceivable grounds would it make sense to ship Massive amounts of military hardware to an openly expansionistic totalitarian dictatorship at the same time as your troops are starving for hardware.
	Right. Well, that is a great question, very seldom asked.
	And I think to back it up just a little bit, America entered World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is a whole other story.
	Oh, let's do that story first.
	I'll bookmark Lindley's, but if we're going to go...
	I was going to bungee, but if we're going to go sequentially, the Pearl Harbor thing was also quite an astonishing revelation as well.
	So let's unpack that a bit, too.
	Well, Pearl Harbor, which we look at as a surprise attack, was...
	Essentially, the culmination of an absolutely extraordinary, multi-continental Soviet intelligence feat of just epic, an epic feat.
	There were Soviet agents aspiring, run by a man named Richard Sorga in Tokyo, whose job essentially was to ensure that the War Party, not the Peace Party, was in power, and to do everything he could through his infiltration.
	He was tremendously wired in through His Japanese communist fellows and so on, essentially to prevent Japan from attacking the Soviet Union.
	Do everything he could to push them to a different decision.
	In other words, not to go to Siberia, but to come south.
	In Washington, we had a deployed KGB agent come to Washington and essentially, at a certain point, meet with Harry Dexter White across the street from the Treasury Department.
	No kidding, in Washington, D.C., and give him language written in Moscow to insert into the United States cable flow with Tokyo.
	There were very tense negotiations going on at this time.
	Eventually, this language was inserted and was regarded, as Moscow knew it would be, as an ultimatum.
	That set a number of events that led to Pearl Harbor directly into motion.
	And that Stalin may have, I mean, seems to be evidence that Stalin knew ahead of time about the Pearl Harbor attack.
	Yes, there was evidence he knew ahead of time.
	The story goes into so many different dimensions.
	I'll just really just mention one more.
	But the basic aspect, the basic takeaway being that there was tremendous influence operations Underway to maneuver the United States and Japan into war.
	Going back a few years further, our first ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Bullitt, was writing cables about this home in about 1935, saying, this is what they want to do.
	They want to put the United States and Japan into war.
	In the run-up to Pearl Harbor, also, you saw all manner of desperate measures coming from Prince Kanoya, leader of the Japanese government at that time, Trying to effect a peace parley with Roosevelt.
	No dice. He's getting all kinds of advice against this.
	There's the embargo that drives Japan to look for our embargo that drove them to look for raw materials and so on.
	Actually, there is a book, Operation Snow, that goes into quite a lot of this detail.
	It's quite a story, but essentially it propels us into war But the strangest thing about it, and I had never thought about this before until I was going through this material, was that rather than fighting Japan, we turned around and declared war on Hitler and fought in Europe and started sending everything to Europe.
	And there was a very fascinating record from a book about Len Lys that I cite in the book, whereby on the attack, the army naturally started loading material For the Pacific War.
	And they literally had to redirect everything to go to Europe.
	Meanwhile, MacArthur, under siege in the Philippines at this point, we're going forward toward Corregidor and the Bataan Death March, is being promised supplies.
	And he's building airfields in preparation of receiving these supplies.
	None of it was coming.
	It was all It was all so much lies coming out of the commander-in-chief to his commander in the field.
	And you had Roosevelt desperately, urgently desiring to just send everything to help the Soviet Union.
	And people say, oh, well, we couldn't get through to Japan.
	We had had this terrible strike on our navy, and there was no way, and there'd be such losses.
	And then you look. At the absolutely ghoulish losses that were incurred by the supplying of the Soviet Union through German U-boat-infested waters.
	There were fewer submarines in the Pacific than there were in the Atlantic.
	I can state that with significant confidence.
	The whole thing, the perfidy that starts to be uncovered, and we start looking for rationales and explanations, and certainly some people were acting in good faith.
	It's not to say that this was some kind of concerted effort.
	But again, you go back to who the top people are.
	You go back to Hopkins, and you go back to Curry, and you go back to this shadow government, really, that Harry Hopkins was able to set up throughout the government, the sort of...
	Sort of the steering wheels of power, that's not the right phrase, but you know, their hands on the levers of power, I guess is the cliche.
	People very close to either the man with his hand on the lever of power or literally with their own power.
	He had set up essentially his own rogue operation, and Len Lace was part of that.
	And we know that- Eastward expansion from the Soviet Empire.
	And once they got hold of the bomb, just to skip to the Rosenberg situation, once they got hold of the bomb, which was directed through the Rosenbergs, then they were able to invade North Korea.
	And we're still dealing with the fallout of that more than 70 years later.
	And so the very idea that these horrible wars fought island to island throughout the Pacific War was the result of a war instigated by communism so that it could span further eastward.
	And at the expense of America and Japan is a shocking view.
	And, you know, the anger and the waste and the lies and the propaganda and what people fought and died for is appalling beyond words.
	Well, here's the really most appalling thing.
	Let's just get it out there. Which is that looking at both the European theatre and the Pacific theatre...
	With this gimlet eye, you do start to realize, and the evidence is overwhelming, that there comes a point relatively early in the war, America's war anyway, where peace was achievable, where victory was achievable.
	And the only reason the fighting continued was in order to allow that Soviet expansion into Europe.
	And then also, and this is sort of my hair on fire now, In the Pacific arena, which I've been studying.
	Also, with absolute certainty, a prevention of the war coming to an end in the Pacific arena, eight, ten months, maybe more, before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped.
	Again, to allow the Soviet Union to have their troops in place in order to seize half of China, And the Keral Islands and so on, and North Korea and so on, to the detriment of not only thousands and thousands of battle deaths,
	two atomic bombs in cities and all the rest of it, But also really speaking to our problems today, because had the war ended when the Japanese were making multiple surrender talks, efforts to various Western capitals, Moscow, which we were actually reading Soviet, I mean, Japanese cables, we could read their diplomatic cables.
	We knew they were trying to get a peace discussion going.
	By refusing that and allowing the Soviets to expand east, We ended up not just with our situation today with North Korea, but this precipitated the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and all the misery that those people created.
	Cambodia, boat people, just misery in general, human suffering, even if they were not killed, just the suffering of these communist regimes.
	That would not have happened.
	There was a very specific moment in May Of 1945, when General Marshall, who is one of these icons who should be re-examined, he literally prevented a sort of peace ultimatum from being issued to the Japanese.
	They were wondering, what does unconditional surrender really look like?
	This was essentially, in both Germany and Japan, unconditional surrender was the best way to keep the Germans and the Japanese fighting to the death, because what's the point?
	You're going to be mown under.
	And in the Japanese theater, there were Questions about what does it look like?
	They wanted to keep their emperor, which we did ultimately permit.
	And General Marshall, this is the actually acting Secretary of State at the time, Joseph Gru, who'd been the ambassador to Japan for many years and was a good guy.
	He drew up, he's very concerned about the continued fighting, even though it was clear to everyone, Japanese, American, everyone, that the Japanese were going to lose, it was no doubt, and wanted to stop fighting.
	Certainly sectors of society wanted to start, the government wanted to stop fighting.
	He said, no, this peace ultimatum would be premature.
	Premature. Yeah, because the Russians didn't want to still have a military power in Japan.
	Now, you talk in the book as well about the...
	The standard or the requirement for Germany to have unconditional surrender was a huge mistake.
	Now, the traditional story goes something like this.
	That while you see in the First World War, nobody directly invaded Germany and the Treaty of Versailles was harsh and so on.
	But because they didn't get unconditional surrender from Germany in the First World War, they really wanted it in the Second World War to prevent World War III. That's kind of the standard narrative if you even question as to why that was a policy.
	But you have a different take.
	I wonder if you can help people figure that one.
	Yeah, sure. Well, actually, that one I'm not as familiar with.
	The story I had always heard was that it just, the way it had been written in many books, is that Roosevelt just kind of, he was thinking about the Civil War and some of the Union generals, and it just kind of popped out at the Casablanca meeting, which would have been, I believe, January of 43.
	This wasn't true at all, because it had actually been discussed and argued intensely about In special groups meeting under the auspices of the State Department.
	It was kind of an enforced notion that I believe was also written for him.
	So the idea that it was some sort of spontaneous measure is fallacy.
	But what's also quite interesting is that instantly the military men knew this was absolutely terrible because all it does is encourage the enemy to continue fighting.
	Particularly after the exposure of what is called the Morgenthau Plan, which really was sort of a plan to plow Germany under, remove all of its technical and industrial capacity, essentially destroy everything, and turn Germany into a nation of farmers.
	Oh well, that would kill about 40 million people by famine in year one.
	I mean, this is sort of what we were looking at.
	This kind of thing leaked out.
	And what did it do?
	It made the people of Germany turn to the only protecting authority, the Nazi regime.
	It wreaked havoc on the anti-Nazi, anti-communist resistance in Germany because all of a sudden, in conjunction with the very punitive bombing raids that were going on at this very, very late date in the war also, it was essentially recommitting people to the only protection they had.
	And indeed, getting back to my father's experience and the experience of so many others, it probably was responsible for that last final breakout that ended up at the Battle of the Bulge.
	It was a surprise. And why would they do that?
	It was a desperate measure.
	Similarly, in the Japanese theater, the idea, and this was actually pushed very loudly by the communist press, literally the communist press in America, the Daily Worker.
	Which actually was, I'm finding out more and more, it's a very influential paper.
	It wasn't just a Communist Party kind of paper.
	It had tremendous influence on the news of the day and how it was told in all the other papers and in politics as well.
	They were pushing the idea very hard that the emperor in Japan was going to be tried as a war criminal.
	Well, just as Germany, you know, was worried about its fatherland, in Japan, their big concern was the emperor.
	And so again, you are recommitting You are empowering the war party that doesn't want to stop fighting, you're destroying the credibility of the peace party, and you are perpetuating the carnage.
	And again, why? We can look at both battlefronts, you can take out all the maps that show where the Soviet Union, where the Red Army was.
	If you ended the war too soon, The Soviet Union would have stayed within its own boundaries.
	And oh my, if you're a communist agent, that's the worst thing that could possibly happen.
	So this becomes the ultimate betrayal, really, of the world.
	That these people in these high places were able to affect.
	Keep the war fighting.
	Expand the Soviet Union.
	And this is another one of these contradictions that I remember as a kid, Diana, really confusing me that England in 1939 goes to war to prevent Poland from falling under dictatorship, from falling out of totalitarian rule.
	And then at the end of the Second World War, Well, you know, so Poland and wide varieties of neighboring countries have been absorbed into a totalitarian regime along with half of Germany.
	It's like, okay, we got to go save this person.
	We're going to dedicate the entire empire.
	We're going to destroy the empire.
	We're going to cause the deaths of millions of people because Poland must be free.
	Let's just give Poland to Stalin.
	Head home and call it a day. And ship a whole bunch of anti-communists back into behind the Iron Curtain, where, of course, on the way, many of them wanted to kill themselves, tried to kill themselves, so they were kept alive brutally by the troops, delivered to the gulags of Stalin, where they were tortured and murdered by the millions.
	This is truly not what you hear about when you see the picture of that guy kissing, that sailor kissing the girl in 1945.
	No, it's not. You refer to Operation Keelhaul, which was something that is just hair-raising to read about in great detail.
	And it literally was exactly as you describe it.
	It was the turning over of troops, prisoners of war, who thought they were surrendering to the British and the Americans and would essentially be given protection and their families.
	You had Massive numbers of displaced peoples who had fled Stalin into Europe.
	Cossack villages, whole villages in folkloric costume.
	I mean, they're animals, they're horses, they're farm animals.
	When the fighting stopped and you had these literally millions of displaced people in place, it must have been, the scene must have been Kind of unimaginable to imagine these people in particularly the Austrian theater and so on.
	And we tricked them back into the trucks and the troop trains and literally delivered them to the Red Army, whereby this anti-communist army of 900,000 men, known as Vlasov's army, we had just recently at one of Putin's victory celebrations just a couple of years ago that Vlasov again came up He was the general who had been under German auspices raising an army to try to fight Stalin.
	It's not legal in Russia, I believe, to praise him or consider him any kind of a patriot because, of course, he was anti-communist, anti-Stalin.
	And he also helped liberate Prague, that's the other piece of it, for us, for the West.
	This is the great war crime that is never ever taught, Operation Keelhaul.
	In fact, it wasn't even known about, really, until a great journalist named Julius Epstein, who had been a refugee from Nazism earlier in the decade.
	He wrote a book called Operation Keelhaul that came out about 1970, I'm thinking.
	And then, of course, you also had, in England, Nikolai Tolstoy's book, The Great Betrayal, and some other books that he also wrote about this same horrendous chapter of history that we're not taught, that we don't talk about.
	And it's, again, testament to this tremendous fear of the Soviet Union and collusion with the Soviet Union and And so it's really something to get your head around.
	But it all does fit.
	It all does make a lot of sense.
	And then we say, oh my gosh, we're in a Cold War.
	How did that happen? Well, and you point out, I think, very powerfully in the book, Diana, that one of the gravest intellectual crimes to be accused of is Holocaust denial, which I completely agree is a grave intellectual crime.
	But it seems very different when the Holocaust is perpetrated against class enemies rather than against Jewish people, that the Holodomor in Ukraine and various other slaughters performed against class enemies.
	By the Soviets.
	And, you know, remember Hitler and the Nazis didn't come out of nowhere.
	They were terrified of communists taking over in Germany because they had seen what had happened in Ukraine to Christians, to middle class people and so on.
	And they feared the same results.
	So there is, I think, I don't want to paraphrase you, but so put it the way that you feel best.
	But it does seem like there's a lot of Holocaust denials that are going on that aren't even acknowledged as problematic in the history of communism.
	Absolutely. I wish I had the quotation.
	There's a wonderful quotation I used above one of my chapters where someone was talking about the many holocausts that are taking place over there, you know, pointing to the east.
	There were many, many writers who were penalized in the early 1930s for talking about the terror famine.
	Malcolm Muggeridge was one before him, was also...
	I'm blanking on his first name, Jones, the Welshman who had been really the first to break this story in a way that Western people were able to understand.
	Meanwhile, all of the Western correspondents in Moscow were well aware of what was going on and they were hiding it.
	They were hiding it and cooperating with the Soviet censors.
	It is really where you start to see this kind of, we look at it now, In so many different media and venues and examples, but this was really one of the signal moments, and indeed Robert Conquest,
	who is the great historian who passed away a couple of years ago, of this sort of exterminationism history, the purges, the show trials, the terror famine, and so on, where he really labels what happened with that famine to be the first big lie.
	The first successful application of falsehood through mass media.
	That's the important ingredient here.
	Mass media was essentially co-opted to a point where the outliers who would report on things, which sounds very familiar, were essentially ignored.
	The marginalized press could be ignored When everybody else acted as if nothing was happening and the media just reinforced it.
	And of course, this is where you get the very famous Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times reporting on Ukraine by Walter Durante.
	Who denied a famine?
	However, there might be some deaths from now on nutrition.
	That was his phrase.
	Food shortages. And this was so shocking, of course, because according to the Soviet theory or the communist theory, communist production should vastly outstrip capitalist production.
	And so this was literally like, you know, you have a view of physics and a view of the world and of gravity and you let go of a ball and it slowly floats upward.
	Like as far as the impact of...
	The endless five-year plans that produced the negatives when they were supposed to produce vast positives was so foundationally catastrophic to this worldview.
	And in this collision between ideology and facts, boy, I always know who I'm rooting for, but I generally know which is going to win.
	Yeah, yeah. It really, you know, what I learned so much when I was writing this book that I knew nothing of, and one of the things that really struck me was that the whole concept of Orwellian language That we associate with totalitarianism and these once upon a time outlandish dictatorships.
	So much of that was originated in the free press, in our own countries, by these kinds of behaviors that were so easily manipulated.
	The crowd mentality, the threat of access.
	One of the most interesting characters I came across was A man named Eugene Lyons, who had been a socialist, never an actual communist, but he was a correspondent for many years in Moscow.
	And he was very much a believer in the revolution that gradually moved away from it.
	But he describes in his memoir the psychological process by which he understood that he was under its thrall and yet coming out of it in a way that I'd never seen anyone do before.
	And it really is a window into that mentality.
	And one of the observations he makes is when he came home to lecture, even as he was starting to understand the reality of the brutality of the regime, the people in America to whom he was lecturing were so hungry for good news about Mother Russia that he didn't really want to disappoint the people in America to whom he was lecturing were so hungry for good news about Mother Russia that he didn't really That he didn't really want to disappoint them, which was kind of a psychological pressure I hadn't thought of.
	But he ultimately broke, and he truly gave a very important insight into all of these things, because he was very well connected.
	Well, of course, in the 1930s, there was widely considered to be a crisis of capitalism, which, you know, I don't want to necessarily get into the whole history of it.
	But I think my particular take on it is that the ultimate means of production to be nationalized is currency.
	I don't care that much about factories.
	It matters who controls the currency.
	And if the government controls the currency, then you have a socialist system in place.
	There may be remnants of the free market and so on.
	And Even the Federal Reserve themselves have admitted that the Great Depression was caused by monetary policy, which is a very dull way of putting it, but a very real phenomenon.
	And of course, they were desperate. They're like, well, this capitalist system is destructive.
	We've got 25% unemployment, unused industrial capacity in the billions of dollars, and...
	People were hungry for a solution.
	And of course, the communists or the leftists, having provoked the crisis in capitalism by socializing the money supply, were then very eager to sell them the New Deal, which was directly socialist slash communist.
	You know, what is communism?
	Well, it's socialism plus time.
	And this desperate thirst for solutions for problems caused by collectivism.
	Hey, how about a little collectivism to solve the problems that you have which have been caused by collectivism?
	That generally is the stairway to hell that they try and push you down.
	Well, that's true. One thing I discovered I thought was quite fascinating was that the father of stimulus funding is Lachlan Curry in our government.
	Lachlan Curry was one of the Soviet agents I mentioned earlier.
	And he worked in the White House.
	And before Keynes was published, he introduced stimulus spending in the early 30s.
	That was his first accomplishment that was very, you know, part of what you're discussing.
	It's kind of an amazing, amazing thing when you connect him with the Soviet project.
	The war supplies. We touched on it before.
	I actually found the part that I was looking for, and I just wanted to read this little paragraph because it is so mind-blowing.
	You wrote, war supplies didn't just, quote, flow to the Soviet Union.
	They flooded it with over half a million trucks and jeeps, nearly a billion dollars worth.
	That's $1940, nearly a billion dollars worth of ordnance and ammunition, thousands of fighter aircraft, bombers and tanks, 13 million pairs of winter boots, 1.7 million tons of petroleum products, a merchant fleet, seems like quite a lot, a thousand steam locomotives, 581 naval vessels, including minesweepers, a thousand steam locomotives, 581 naval vessels, including minesweepers, landing craft, submarine chasers, frigates, torpedo boats, floating dry docks, pontoon barges, river tugs, and a light cruiser.
	And I think of the astonishing amount of resources that had to be pulled together, the massive amount of capital machinery that needed to be put into place to produce this, that was...
	The workers doing overtime sweating as they are bringing together the military hardware that the Red Army needs to take over Eastern Europe and to create the Iron Curtain.
	I mean, can you imagine telling the American workers the truth?
	Well, you've got to get and go work 18 hours a day, be paid very little because Uncle Joe needs his war machinery to subjugate half of Europe.
	Yes, and I think the most interesting item was when Khrushchev, in one of his Happy Jolly interviews, I believe, in Life magazine later on, said that without those Dodge trucks, they could not have gotten into, you know, halfway across Europe, because they could not have traveled without them.
	And that, to me, was truly a staggering notion that just, aside from all the weaponry, and of course, The butter, which was being rationed here, and the oil plant, and the train and telephone systems, and all manner of things.
	These spotlights, which we fear were used in concentration camps in the Soviet Union, and of course the ships.
	There was that truly, you know, some of this research is just so upsetting.
	You know, there was the book I believe it's referenced somewhere in the book by the man who discovered that some of our ships that were refitted out for Soviet use during this period were actually transporting prisoners to the Gulag, literally, and even American prisoners to the Gulag.
	So this is, you know, just...
	Perfity upon perfity upon perfity.
	And the priorities, the war priorities are truly astonishing.
	And you lift the lid on some of these thoughts.
	Not only Roosevelt saying, hey, I've got some great friends who are communists.
	It's like, I'm really not too happy about all of that.
	But when he said, you quote him in the book, you say, he says, I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russian front collapse.
	What an astonishing statement.
	What an astonishing statement.
	And the idea... That the focus on destroying Hitler's Germany was because Hitler's Germany, Germany under Hitler, was invading the Soviet Union.
	That Hitler's Germany had to be stopped before it destroyed Soviet Russia.
	That is astonishing.
	And let's talk about D-Day at this point, because as you point out in the book, there were many other avenues with which to open a second front, if that's what was wanted.
	And it also struck me as well, and this may sound callous, but in the sort of real politic of human lives, it always struck me as odd that Germany had to be completely destroyed from top to toe, back to front.
	But the Soviet Union could kind of be left alone, and it just ended up collapsing on its own.
	And it's like, well, we know that would have happened.
	National socialism was socialism.
	It was a war-footing centrally planned economy, which means that it would have collapsed in and of itself, as all of these economies tend to do over time.
	Central planning doesn't work. It doesn't have the price mechanism to...
	And so the policy of containment, which always struck me as kind of like appeasement, the policy of containment with the Soviet Union was not even remotely applied to Germany, which had to be destroyed from top to bottom.
	And I think that you lift the lid on some of these motivations that the hostility to Germany came out of its opposition to Soviet Russia, which had to be saved at all costs.
	Right. Well, if you look at Germany and Japan as bookends on Soviet expansion and communist expansion, they both had to be destroyed, and they were.
	And I think that that becomes a very plain objective of these same One item you didn't mention in terms of Lend-Lease I would just like to throw out there is the shipment of uranium.
	This is a massive piece of the book's essentially case argument because Lend-Lease was subverted from within to flout the Manhattan Project embargo on exporting uranium that was set by General Groves, who is the head of the project.
	And we know this because there was a tremendous witness whose name should be known to all Americans.
	His name was Major George Racy Jordan.
	And I examine him very closely in the book because he is the only American witness against Harry Hopkins, who's also examined very closely in the book.
	And what we know of Harry Hopkins' doings, perfidious doings, mostly come from Soviet sources.
	Jordan really knew, and it's not exactly true, there were others who had observations about Hopkins as well, but Jordan came out and testified In Congress after the Soviet Union detonated their bomb, and he realized that in his position in Lend-Lease, he was called an expediter.
	He was the senior American at a big airfield, a hub for all this machinery and such, and maps and plans and formulas and everything else going to the Soviet Union.
	He was shipping uranium and I believe it's 23 other exotic elements that go into the creation of an atomic pile, an experimental atomic pile.
	Including heavy water and millions of pounds of aluminum tubing, which is also part of the process.
	He realized that he had been part of this.
	He, during the war, tried to tell Washington, I don't think we should be sending this kind of thing.
	I don't know what it is, but it doesn't look right.
	And he was turned back.
	And then after the war, some conservative congressmen were able to bring him to Washington, where he testified very forthrightly.
	Everything they could check in terms of a document A bill of shipping and so on.
	Checked out. There were corroborating reports from people along the pipeline who supported his story.
	The only thing that we can't corroborate that's on his word is that it was Harry Hopkins who called him up.
	He actually dealt with Hopkins quite frequently in his job.
	And he says that Harry Hopkins called him up and asked him to expedite a shipment of uranium that was coming from Canada.
	So in other words, Hopkins was breaking the American embargo and going to Canadian stocks secretly.
	And he asked Jordan to keep it on the QT, which of course he did because this was the big man.
	And later on, he told the story and it's very damning.
	That's the pilot.
	They spilt, right?
	They spilt, the powder came out, and he picks it up, and the Soviet is like, no, no, no, burn hands, burn hands!
	Yeah, that kind of thing.
	All kinds of stuff. It's head exploding.
	And this capacity to overlook the bodies, this sentence struck me so powerfully in your book.
	Those 20 million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth, one-eighth of the entire Russian population.
	One-eighth of the entire...
	I have yet to fundamentally fathom, Diana, how one could be so cold-hearted as to say, well, you know the old saying, you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
	And as you point out, George Orwell said, where's the omelet?
	Where is all of this benefit?
	They're not shells.
	They're one-eighth of...
	The communist regime killed one-eighth of the entire Russian population.
	And that's just beyond astonishing.
	That's not even including wartime.
	That's just straight-up democide.
	One-eighth of the entire Russian population.
	I would love to know the calculus that goes on in these cold-blooded, heartless human beings, wherein somehow that calculation comes out a net positive in any way, shape, or form.
	That's cold-blooded, heartless human beings.
	I think that there is a tremendous streak of warmongering in the human soul.
	I think a lot of these people...
	Who end up in these positions of power, and including academics who have a measure of power as well.
	Not the same kind of power as a politician or a political leader, but there is a tremendous heartlessness and damage in their own psyche that I think does tend to be able—monstrosity, monster.
	I mean, these words apply, I'm afraid, to many, many, many of these people.
	Who become inured or are already put together that way and are able to engage in this if they are the dictator or are able to apologize for it and perpetuate it and imagine that it can somehow become a benefit to mankind.
	Or the ideology is just a cover for their sick desire to watch people suffer.
	Maybe it's just pure sadism and so on.
	Because you have this great point that you make on the dichotomy between fact and conclusion.
	And the conclusion generally is a moral conclusion that is enormously resistant.
	There's another quote where you say, yes, the Nazi system killed six million people.
	Fact. And yes, the Nazi system was evil.
	Conclusion. Well, nobody's going to have any problem with that.
	And you go on to say, and yes, the Soviet system killed 20 million people.
	Fact. But how dare that cowboy, Ronald Reagan, call the Soviet Union the evil empire?
	Like post-modernism itself, this massive inconsistency on Nazism and communism doesn't make a shred of sense.
	I remember literally when I heard that Ronald Reagan had said that jumping out of my chair saying, finally somebody has said that the sky is blue and sometimes it rains.
	Somebody has finally said that the world is a sphere and the moon and the sun are different sizes.
	Somebody has finally said the speed of light is constant.
	Somebody has finally stated the obvious.
	And like anybody who states the obvious, every ideologue on the planet comes screaming at you from the skies themselves.
	Right. It took an act of courage.
	I mean, the idea that that was somehow a courageous statement and that it took so long for someone to say that from that office is shocking.
	And again, we're washed over with all of this.
	We're so subject to these different vectors of information warfare that we don't even really realize these things until we sort of step out and try to take another look at these different phenomena.
	And that's Essentially, I mean, that is sort of the groove I got into with this particular research.
	And I was so knocked out by the example of so many heroes in our past that have been taken from us.
	They don't exist in our, whether it's George R.C. Jordan, certainly Joseph McCarthy.
	Whitaker Chambers, astonishing hero.
	All of these people, people whose names are very unfamiliar.
	Julius Epstein, I mentioned earlier.
	Elizabeth Bentley.
	The Congressman Martin Dyes.
	Pat McCarran, these are Democrats on the Hill who did these great investigations into communist infiltration.
	They are still excoriated for it, even as people today, the scholars today, try to play a little game and say, oh, yes, yes, this is a problem, but these people were, you know, repressive red-baiters.
	I mean, they try to have it both ways.
	It makes no sense, which ultimately is what we should be seeking.
	No matter what anyone else says.
	It's a very simple childlike lesson, but this ultimately is where you go.
	And it's why I've always loved, and I opened the book with the child in The Emperor's New Clothes, who just says it, who just speaks out and says, the emperor has no clothes, the empire is evil, the sky is blue.
	I mean, these are the people in our history we should treasure and put on pedestals.
	There's a whole slew of them that I think we can learn from and if we are to reconstitute, if we are to come out of this and move to a better place, we do need to rediscover them.
	And I appreciate your time.
	Let's spend a few minutes talking about the battle as it stands.
	Because you quote Solzhenitsyn in the book, he wrote, the Soviet regime could certainly have been breached only by literature.
	And this is an astonishing statement that I was really, I sort of stopped and meditated on when you quoted him.
	Because the battle of words is eventually displaced by the battle of swords.
	And if it comes to the battle of swords, generally you lose no matter what, because there's so much corruption and destruction and violence.
	I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it is an extraordinary act of self-defense that a country has to be invaded and push it back and so on.
	But these initiating wars and so on that occur generally end up with everybody being worse off and the evil people rising to the top.
	And so at the moment, as you point out with the sort of your examination of cultural Marxism and political correctness and so on, the appeal of Marxism to the working class, which was significantly predicted by Marx, of course, failed to appear.
	The working class was supposed to inevitably and naturally adopt Marxism as they got continually more exploited by the evil, monocle-wearing, rapacious capitalists in the cliché.
	But of course, they didn't.
	They became robustly middle class.
	They became robustly free market.
	They became robustly commonsensically against creepy ideologies like postmodernism and existentialism.
	And they just couldn't sell this, you know, vaguely nicotine-y, smoky French and German idealism to the working classes.
	So then they said, okay, well, the full frontal assault using the weaponization of the working class is not going to work.
	So instead of kicking through the door, we're going to become turmoins.
	We're going to drill into the base of Western society and we're going to eat it away a bit.
	It's going to take a lot longer, but the victory will be even more certain.
	And this is where the cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School and political correctness and so on stands at the moment.
	Help people to understand why things have become so hysterical on campuses, why there's this rampaging mob of people all over the internet trying to sniff out thought crimes and destroy people's lives.
	And at the end, you know, having sat the elephant of history on people's chest, let's get it to step up a little bit and help them understand what they can do.
	Well, I think that the things you describe that are going on, we look at the campuses, again, If you need any proof that we lost the Cold War, I think the fact that the campuses are outposts of Marxism is about as convincing a set of evidence you can possibly have.
	Nobody would say we won the war against Nazism if tens of thousands of Nazis were openly indoctrinating children on the taxpayers' dime in government universities.
	Right. And shutting down anti-Nazis.
	Right. It's exactly the same.
	In terms of where we are and What to do.
	It's sort of like the most important thing that people can do, I guess.
	I mean, it's a bleak moment, I find.
	I do find that the closer you can get to truth in how you speak, it's got to be very, very important, otherwise they would not be going so crazy to shut down conservative speakers.
	I mean, what a stupid thing to do.
	Or shut down people on the internet and weed us out.
	However, the techniques and the mechanisms are such that this is very effective in terms of a strategy.
	It's very, very effective.
	I don't know.
	It really depends on...
	Right now we have a tremendous political crisis underway.
	We seem to have given this space through the non-election of Hillary Clinton and the election of Donald Trump.
	He bought us a little time, like McCarthy.
	He bought us a little time, yeah.
	And I don't know what we'll be able to do with it.
	I think the alternatives to these giant platforms are very important, but I don't know how to do that.
	It's a difficult moment to come up with that sort of panacea.
	I don't know. I still just struggle with trying to get it right to understand what they're doing to us.
	I somehow feel that that still is the place that there is power, you know, when you can actually call it out and when you can actually...
	But the mechanism of enforcement has to be restored.
	You know, if the Justice Department doesn't prosecute people who perjure themselves, etc., There is no law and order, and there's certainly no law for one and all.
	It's law for some and none.
	It's a hideous thing just by the by.
	It's a hideous thing to see all of these communists openly devoted to the violent overthrow of the United States taking advantage of every conceivable protection of the law while being questioned.
	I plead the fifth. What was the guy with the photographic equipment in his basement who said he pled the fifth about the house he'd lived in for 10 years, whether he ever even went down to the basement or not.
	And that is, I mean, where were the protections for the show trials that were going on simultaneously in the Stalinist Russia that they so worshipped?
	And this is the vile thing about this set as well.
	It's just how they will use your liberties against you.
	They will use your liberties to protect themselves.
	But the sole goal of taking your liberties away and marching you off to a gulag in the middle of the night, if you're lucky.
	Yeah, I mean, I guess the one thing that I personally would like to see happen is the archives, our archives open.
	You know, one of my favorite groups is Judicial Watch, just because they are able to go to the court and open up the documents that they seek.
	And this should really be something that Donald Trump could do himself.
	I mean, he could declassify so much, because in the secrets are power.
	I actually came to look at the world very differently in terms of it wasn't really a struggle to me anymore between the free world and communism or certainly not just Republican and Democrat.
	It became a contest between those who wanted to expose the truth and those who had reason to hide it.
	And if you actually start looking, it's a different rubric of understanding people and their motivations.
	It goes across parties and so on.
	Those who want to hide the secrets are drawing power from it and corruption.
	And those who want to just open it up Let the sun in are generally on the side of the angels.
	And, you know, this becomes an argument certainly for transparency.
	But when we understand how much power is derived from not telling people what these government bureaucrats who work for us are doing, we start to understand the extent to which we've lost our powers as citizens to make these kinds of judgments and understand who should be going to jail and who should not be on a pedestal in Washington, D.C., which there's a lot of that.
	I get a lot of calls in my call-in show, Diana, from young men and women who are in academia and have, you know, been sold the yellow brick road to academia as the road to status and wealth and education and wisdom and opportunity and so on.
	And it's sometimes pretty tortured conversations, to be frank, because they say, I'm being taught these most appalling lies.
	I'm being taught to hate my culture, myself, my gender, my race, whatever, my class.
	And they say, well, what should I do?
	And it is a very tough, very tough thing to give advice about because I view higher academia in the West as...
	I mean, there are still some vestiges.
	I got a master's.
	I left higher education just as the tsunami was coming in, just as the old guard was giving way, who had grown up in the Cold War and had some significant skepticism about communism.
	And there was some possibility, and you could really see this bifurcation in the generations in the view of communism.
	I got out just as the tsunami was coming in.
	But I think a lot of young people are being buried now.
	Do you think that, let's just talk about the arts or A place where you don't need, like you would with engineering, which is more objective, or science, where you don't need the accreditation.
	Do you think an arts degree is a decent investment?
	I'm having a tough time making the case these days.
	I think it's a pretty grim and losing battle.
	I agree. On the other hand, for a young person to get a job generally is a prerequisite, you know, for most jobs.
	Some young people don't need to go, and they are the kind of people who will make their own way regardless of But that is not something for everyone.
	You know, it's a difficult thing.
	And I say that having put twin daughters through college recently.
	And it was, for me, it was a pretty horrible experience in terms of the whole process.
	It's become an absolute nightmare.
	You mean the nightly deprogramming sessions that mom has to do?
	Over the years, I think they were pretty skeptical.
	Just having grown up, I used to write a weekly column and they were very, the whole, all these issues were very present in their lives.
	So they're fairly attuned.
	But still, the, you know, just the common, the common experience of so many is...
	My nine-year-old daughter can stop traffic chatting about Hillary Clinton.
	I just wanted to mention that.
	People are like, what the what?
	Who is this person? It's a terrible situation because these colleges are under this hold and they have been for a very long time.
	We can go back to 1912 and see Harvard Law School really come under Fabian's way in terms of the way law was taught, which is a long time.
	So it's You know, been fanning out for over 100 years, certainly.
	But it had to spread without the internet.
	And we do have this tool at the moment.
	You know, just this conversation that is going to go out to half a million or more people, this conversation that we're having today would have been impossible 10, 15 years ago.
	And even if we'd been able to record it, the distribution mechanisms wouldn't have existed.
	It's not like we'd have got radio time or television time to have this conversation, but this is going to go out like My show just passed, I think, half a billion views and downloads.
	All of this stuff is... So it's spread in an insidious manner, and we've been given this great weapon, this astonishing ring of power, so to speak.
	Actually, probably the wrong analogy, because that was an evil thing.
	But we've been given this astounding Gutenberg press as against the monks who have to copy out everything by hand.
	We have this replication mechanism to bring the truth out to people.
	So the fact, because I sit there and think, oh man, you know, so it's been 110 years since they started.
	They've got a little bit of a head start and they own academia, they own the media, they own Hollywood, they own the television studios.
	What are we supposed to do?
	And it's like, oh yeah. We're just supposed to talk and we're supposed to get information out to people in as engaging a manner as possible.
	People can get your book. We'll put links to it below.
	People can listen to this. They can share it.
	They can spread it. And they didn't have the internet to spread.
	We have the internet to push back.
	Of course, they have the internet too, but we have the truth.
	Right. Right. Which is very compelling.
	And what I found with this book in particular...
	Which was, you know, ignored by MSM, of course, was people were hungry for it.
	I mean, the letters, people writing about their own, their parents' experiences, what they've heard, the most extraordinary reader response that I've certainly ever had.
	And I found so many people, it sort of kindled memories and sort of nascent understandings that Just came to them.
	And it's been overwhelming as an author to have that relationship with so many readers.
	I've been so happy with that alone.
	So people are hungry for it.
	They need it. They can get it.
	And, you know, it's very energizing in that sense.
	And finding the truth, pursuing the truth, and understanding where to look for the truth, I think, is also empowering.
	Fighting evil is a powerful hobby and makes every waking breath worthwhile.
	Well, thank you again so much.
	Very generous with your time.
	We touched on some themes in the book, but I strongly urge people to sit down, read through it, talk about it, share information in it.
	The book is called... American Betrayal, The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character.
	And also check out The Death of the Grown-Up, How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
	We'll put links to those below.
	Check out the website, dianawest.net and twitter.com forward slash dianawest.
	Diana Underbar West, sorry, Underbar.
	Again, you're welcome back anytime.
	What a fantastic conversation.
	Thank you so much for everything you've done and for the time that you've given my audience today.
	Thank you. It's been a great pleasure.

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