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March 30, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

57:36

4331 The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy - West/Molyneux

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux.
	Hope you're doing well here with Diana West.
	Now, she's been on the show once before, but now the red objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
	She's written a new book called The Red Thread around the common ideology and motivation behind the attempt to overthrow the effects of the 2016 election.
	Diana, thank you so much for taking the time today.
	Thank you so much for having me on.
	I guess we should start with how important the issue at hand is.
	I've seen your interviews, I've seen interviews with other people who say this is the gravest constitutional crisis America may have faced ever or certainly since the Civil War.
	What are the stakes at work with the recently concluded Mueller investigation and what's been going on behind the scenes?
	Yes, well, it's certainly a unique constitutional crisis.
	We've never seen the government itself Elements of the government itself actually engage in a conspiracy to overturn an election.
	Duly elected president using the massive surveillance powers of the security state to do so.
	Subverting the court system that is supposed to protect American citizens from this kind of police state activity.
	I mean, this is the kind of thing that we've read about in totalitarian countries.
	We know about from totalitarian countries.
	This is not supposed to happen here, and I think that in and of itself is the truly gravest aspect of this.
	What is frightening and our peril at this moment is, will we fully expose it and prosecute those that should be prosecuted to ensure that they pay the penalty of the law if indeed we can try them and find them guilty?
	Or will we move on as we normally do in these kinds of situations?
	And certainly you get that sense at this point with the conclusion of the Mueller report, with the filing of the Mueller report.
	I don't believe this is the end of that entire vector of attack.
	But with this particular political decision, you are starting to sense the tectonic shift to now let's move on.
	And yet there is a great deal of pushback to know, let's find out what really happened, who's responsible, chain of command, and where it really starts.
	And what I've done in the Red Thread is essentially ask the question, not so much to more fully reveal the mechanics of what happened.
	We've seen some good books and good reporting, good investigation, showing us the beginnings of how the mechanics of this occurred.
	What I'm asking is, Why did these senior Washington officials engage in such a lawless kind of conspiracy against the American people?
	Let's go back to the origin of it, because the standard narrative on the left is that, well, there probably was a Russia collusion, but they just couldn't quite get around to proving it, but he's still kind of illegitimate and all that, which I think we can safely discard.
	But even on the right, there's this sense that, well, they're just sore losers.
	They were really, really unhappy that Hillary Clinton, an experienced politician, lost to a noob, and they just concocted this thing to throw shade on the president.
	And I think the half-explanation is more dangerous even than the non-explanation because the risks that these people took to surveil the president, to concoct all of these Russian narratives, collusion narratives and so on, the potential illegality that they went through was of such extraordinarily high risk levels that it seems hard to be, well, you know, they just couldn't quite take the loss.
	Right, right.
	Well, think about it in terms of The hallmark of American democracy is the peaceful transition of power.
	Your party loses this time, wait till next time.
	The power rocks back and forth between the two major parties and has since the beginning.
	This is nothing new.
	This is really one of the achievements of America.
	So this is not normal.
	This is not just a matter of beans or losers.
	People are sorry losers every time.
	And they, you know, go, they leave government and come back and, you know, come back to power eventually or not.
	And that's just the way it goes.
	No, this is something different.
	And I think one, it shows the arrogance of one, assuming it would work, assuming that Donald Trump would go down, assuming that Hillary Clinton would come into power and that nothing would ever be known of any of this.
	It would just go right down the memory hole.
	And two, as you note, the, the, the, the, the crazy kind of of putting it all on the line in the event of exposure, in the event of potential prosecution.
	I mean, that is where you have to go to to understand this is not just normal Democrat Party politics versus Republican Party politics.
	We're starting to look at fanatics.
	And when you start to peel back the layers and actually try to construct some ideological profiles, which is essentially what the red thread is, it's a series of ideological profiles of some of the major figures in this anti-Trump conspiracy.
	You start realizing this is not normal American politics at all.
	It is actually something outside our can.
	It goes much more closely to the import of communist ideology, of Marxism, the imposition of Marxism onto our institutions and into our education system and all the rest of it, whereby the ends justify the means.
	There is no law.
	They are anti-constitution.
	They are anti-citizen.
	This is all about going toward that collective A beautiful future that they all seem so enamored with.
	And I think this is where you have to get back to another why question is having to do with the fact that is Donald Trump that triggered this outrageous behavior?
	Because I argue in the book that he is a counter-revolutionary figure.
	He's the first American president to come forth to actually set out to reverse the direction we've been going in, certainly since World War II, toward an international system, the globalist system.
	They call it the liberal world order and all the rest of it.
	That was inaugurated at the end of World War II with the inauguration of the United Nations, which was brought into being by a Soviet agent named Alger Hiss, who worked in the United States State Department, and the global monetary system, which was brought into being by another Soviet agent inside the which was brought into being by another Soviet agent inside the United States Treasury Department, Harry Dexter White, the first head of the
	It's so strange to think that we live in this ideological structure that was built by long-dead Soviet agent totalitarian loving horrible human beings and it's like you know there's a story there's always in mythology and so on that you can kill the man you cannot kill the idea and it's like well yes so the Soviet Union has ended of course
	But that doesn't mean that Marxism ended, and the media should know this, because the Nazi party was last around about 70 years ago, but they see Nazis everywhere, so they're perfectly willing to understand that an ideology can survive its political manifestation and seeks a new home, just as they think there are all these Nazis all over America trying to turn it into the next or the fourth Reich or something.
	So the fact that we talk about communism, people think, oh man, what are you crazy?
	That's just deep in the rear view.
	It's the 80s.
	And it was a false scare even back then.
	But the ideology, I mean, I keep pointing out that there are thousands of outright Marxist teaching, indoctrinating the young in American universities, but somehow the threat is, you know, three neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.
	And it is very much a living, breathing ideology that still seeks world dominance.
	Well, that's very true.
	And what was a revelation to me, because frankly, I began this work as a thought experiment.
	It began with Nellie Orr, really in the December of 2017, when we learned about this very peculiar couple, Bruce Orr, the senior Justice Department official, and his wife, Nellie, at the heart of the Fusion GPS dossier writing team, the Russia expert.
	And because she was an academic in her previous life, in the 1990s, she taught Russian-Soviet studies at Vassar, there would be a paper trail that you could start to try to decode, which is how the book really started.
	And so you point that out because when you have officials it's kind of tough to know what their ideology is, but when you have academics, well, you know, there's confessions to intellectual and moral crimes all over the place sometimes.
	Absolutely, although I will say I was quite shocked I had never actually come across, I mean, maybe I've led a charmed life, I had never actually read the writings of someone writing between, say, 1996 and 2004, I believe is the range of book reviews, for example, that I examined by Nellior, apologizing for Stalin.
	Stalin.
	Not even just abstract Marxism, maybe it hasn't been tried, you know, that kind of thing.
	Not the sort of, you know, out-of-body experience Marxist.
	Apologies.
	No, this was literally discussing the terror of the Stalin era versus the excitement, the excitement of the Stalin era.
	Yeah, like it's some roller coaster ride from hell.
	And it's horrible enough to praise Stalin in the 30s and the 40s and the early 50s and so on, but, you know, post Khrushchev, post Solzhenitsyn, post Venona papers, like, come on!
	I mean, Stalin is the Hitler of Communism, although with arguably an even higher body count.
	And so to defend, oh, can you imagine saying that about Hitler?
	Well, it was an exciting but thrilling time.
	I mean, come on, dangerous, yet exciting, yet terrible.
	Or, as you point out in the book, that she says, well, it's tough to teach young people about Stalin because they're torn, they're conflicted, you know?
	It's tough to give them all the nuance of all the upside to the multi-million slaughter fest that was Stalinist Russia.
	And it's like, Of all the things to complain about, it's mind-blowing.
	It is mind-blowing, particularly when you realize she left the college campus, had a long-term relationship with the CIA, and as a contractor, as far as we know, that's the extent of it, but that's kind of a nice way to, you know, have that deniability, but certainly at least six years as a contractor.
	And then she is at the heart of this anti-Trump conspiracy, working at Fusion GPS with, you know, cultivating this Russian fake dossier.
	That's a frightening thought.
	If you have a Stalin apologist working in this way, you can look at her, what I consider her opposite number, the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, who you peel back his layers and you find out that back in the day, in the 1980s, when he was a very prominent student at Cambridge University, he was the president of the Cambridge Union, the august debating society there, and he was known on campus as a quote, confirmed socialist.
	Well, you're starting to match up, you know, your little red onions there.
	I mean, this is starting to look like a like to like.
	He also was known for some kind of association with the very Marxist, really Soviet front group.
	And you may argue the campaign for nuclear disarmament, which back in the 80s was very much in line with then the Soviet foreign policy focused on pushing America out of NATO, preventing America from deploying This is Christopher Steele.
	You can't ignore the ideology as much as the media and politicians would like to.
	You start continuing to look and you find, lo and behold, you find James Comey, the fired FBI director, in open interviews in 2003 discussing having been a communist himself, him discussing it,
	in the 1980s when he was a student at William and Mary, writing a thesis about a man that I did not know much about going into this, I will confess, Reinhold Niebuhr, his lifelong, deep influence, someone he continually genuflects in front of any time he's asked about influence in his life.
	When he was a communist, he discovered Reinhold Niebuhr, and now, 30, 40 years later, it's still Reinhold Niebuhr.
	It was his Twitter handle until he was discovered A couple of years ago, and indeed he told the New York Times in 2018 that these two most influential books on his development were by Niebuhr, going back to Niebuhr's 1930s experiences as a member of the Socialist Party, a very militant member calling for violence as a necessary ingredient to change the social order on campuses back in the day.
	I mean, this is not just, you know, some kind of experimental feel-good kumbaya kind of A youthful fling.
	This is hardcore revolutionary rhetoric that attracted a man who didn't just go and subvert our children, right?
	He actually became the number two Justice Department official in 2003.
	He was the Rod Rosenstein of the Ashcroft Justice Department, and then of course several years later became the FBI director.
	This is a revolutionary in generic sort of Republican suit and tie, big resume clothing.
	So I just want to put that in perspective for the listeners and let me know if I mischaracterized anything, Diane.
	But when you're in the public sphere, Heaven forbid I ever interview anyone who may have kicked a cat when they were 12.
	You know, and the video emerges and it's like, oh yeah, I remember when you interviewed that cat kicker, you sadist!
	You know, like, the guilt by association that happens when you're on the cliff edge of criticizing communism is something that we all kind of have to be aware of.
	It's a real shame, but it is just the reality of things.
	Now, for the director, the former director of the FBI, to be warbling on about how his biggest influence was a guy who advocated the use of violence to overthrow the American government.
	I mean, that is truly astonishing.
	He was in charge of the FBI.
	His number one guy, his big, his Twitter handle, his big go-to guy was a guy who said, use any means necessary, if I understand the argument correctly, to overthrow the existing US political system, to shred and bypass the Constitution.
	So I guess I gotta wonder, like, how do you swear an oath to the Constitution and then genuflect in front of a guy who wanted to do to the Constitution what the guys in Fargo did to the guy in the woodchipper?
	I mean, that's just absolutely astounding what you can get away with if you're not where we are, I suppose.
	Well, it's all about power and seizing power, and by any means necessary.
	And if that requires an oath that you don't believe in, that's very minor small potatoes.
	I mean, this is the ethos of the Marxist revolutionary.
	And when you see the thread going through here, and I would like to add something else about Comey, which I think is really important here.
	Conservatives very often talk and worry and try to uncover the depredations of the Frankfurt School.
	People know that term, the Frankfurt School, the cultural Marxist importation.
	I actually believe that they were late to the party, that it was already done pretty much by the time they were in translation.
	But these were, of course, the mainly German Jewish refugees, academics who came out of Hitler's Germany and were Essentially, seated throughout American academia, interestingly enough, through an organization, an international education organization that was headed by a man by the name of Stephen Duggan.
	His real leg man, a much younger man at the time, was Edward R. Murrow, who became the very famous CBS icon and direct enemy of Senator Joseph McCarthy back in the day.
	They were at loggerheads, the anti-anti-communist and the anti-communist, you might say.
	Stephen Duggan, just for one other data point here, his son, Lawrence Duggan, became a State Department official who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent.
	So you see the Marxism and the Soviet agentry, you know, working together, moving together as in the, what is, I'm butchering the Maoist phrase, but the swimming in the Red Sea, the fish who swims in the Red Sea.
	But the point here being that Comey's professor, was Reinhold Niebuhr back in the day in the 1950s at Union Theological Seminary.
	Niebuhr had helped a member, a genuine straight-up member, of the Frankfurt School get a position there, a man by the name of Paul Tillich, who believed that Christianity needed sort of a Marxist resuscitation to be relevant in the 20th century.
	So we have a straight-up Frankfurt School representative here who also taught Comey's professor.
	So we've got a direct intellectual chain of custody from the Frankfurt School, Reinhold Niebuhr, you know, the man of the Marxian ethics, as you've been described, to Comey's professor, a man named Robert Livingston, to Comey, to the American people.
	So we've got a direct weaponization, if you will, of these ideas, of the Frankfurt School, radicalization of the Christian Marxism, if you want to call it that, of Reinhold Niebuhr, Coming directly into play in our lives.
	And now when you see, for example, when James Comey decided, took on the guise of indeed the Attorney General himself back in 2016, when he decided that Hillary Clinton did not merit in any kind of referral, any kind of criminal referral.
	He completely dismissed charges all by himself.
	You start to understand how that could be.
	This is the system that he's learned and imbibed And it, again, comes down to by any means necessary.
	Right.
	So, we'll get to sort of the more nitty-gritty of how this all unfolded, but I guess one of the questions that troubled me from time to time, and the book really goes into this in great detail, and it's a fantastic book, I'll certainly put a link to it below so that people can get a hold of it, but why on earth Would Vladimir Putin be pro-Trump when he was pretty much getting everything he wanted from Hillary and from the Democrats?
	That's sort of one of the fun... I mean, I know she talked tough, like, oh, the cyber warfare and all that kind of stuff, but the transfer of technology, the fact that she seemed to be in bed with helping deliver 20% of America's uranium to Russian-controlled companies, the fact that she was scooping up truckloads of cash from giving speeches and so on, I don't really see how Putin benefited from working with Trump as opposed to working with Hillary.
	Well, let's go to the source of that, what I consider to be a big lie of this anti-Trump conspiracy, James Comey.
	James Comey testified before Congress that Putin hated Hillary.
	This is one of the sources of this very Ridiculous kind of idea.
	And I would distill it even just to one particular difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as candidates.
	And I think this was a very important point in the campaign, perhaps in terms of inspiring this conspiracy.
	Hillary Clinton, as a candidate in 2016, told a group that the last thing we need, quote, the last thing we need are sophisticated cruise missiles with nuclear capability.
	Donald Trump gave a speech not long after this and said that America's nuclear arsenal was degraded, needed to be modernized, needed to be revamped and expanded, and needed to do so immediately.
	So imagine you are sitting in the Kremlin, and you are Vladimir Putin, and you are weighing which candidate is going to give me, with my nuclear edge that I've been working very hard to gain against the West, who has tremendous nuclear capabilities at this point, who do I prefer?
	The one who wants to continue the degradation of American forces under Barack Obama?
	Or this crazy America First guy who actually wants to restore American manufacturing borders and our nuclear arsenal?
	None of it makes sense.
	So you start to see the gelling of this fable.
	I mean, that's a nice word for it, but it hangs on perniciously.
	And as you know from, you've read American Betrayal, American Betrayal might be really framed as a history of the Big Lie in the modern media age.
	And Robert Conquest, the great Soviet historian, well British-American Soviet historian, historian of Soviet history, he marked the first Big Lie as having been the Ukraine terror famine, whereby Stalin engineered a famine to destroy, to wipe out millions and millions of free-holding peasants In other words, to collectivize agriculture and take away the private ownership of land.
	There was this tremendous killing field in Ukraine whereby people were literally starved to death by the millions, deported, froze, you know, all the rest of it, on the edge of Europe.
	Nobody paid attention.
	Franklin Roosevelt decided to recognize the Bolshevik regime shortly after this began to subside and Nelly Orr comes along later And writes about the glorious stabilization of this collective farm.
	Do I remember this number from your book correctly, Diana, that's six million?
	It's the rough headcount of the Holodomor, of the Ukrainian starvation and mass murder, and almost certainly genocide of a particular landowning class.
	That's six million people.
	Seems to ring a bell about something else that's a little harder to forget these days, but I guess that's where the politics lie.
	Well, that is where the politics lie, and they lay there at the same time, because it wasn't that people didn't have the information.
	There was information coming out of the Soviet Union.
	The media was just as corrupt as we see today.
	I mean, there's a very extensive discussion of what the media did to actually demonize one reporter who brought a press conference together and actually discussed what was really going on.
	This is when the New York Times won its It's completely nefarious Pulitzer Prize for reporting that there was no famine.
	This is Walter Durante.
	People may actually even have heard of him around 1932, 1933.
	This really illegitimate Pulitzer Prize that the New York Times and Washington Post can now bookend with their Pulitzer Prize for the Russia collusion hoax that they won last year.
	So we see continuity here also.
	But what I was saying was that this is a big lie using mass media, using The just repetition of mass media, which really wasn't possible before mass media, really begins in this early 1930s period, according to Conquest.
	I kind of took that and ran with it and marked the progression of big lies that really have subverted our understanding of practically everything that we think we know about our history, the war, the Cold War, and the rest of it.
	I believe that the Putin hates Hillary.
	I mean, yes, the Putin hates Hillary.
	Actually is in this same tradition, and it's very effective We see it continuously repeated to this day, and I would like to note with the Muller report Yes, there's this bright shiny thing that there was no Russian collusion which Andrew McCarthy the former federal prosecutor actually wrote a fascinating piece Pegging Robert Muller's understanding of this he believes to 18 months ago He says that Muller knew 18 months ago.
	There was no Russian collusion I would love to know the date where that dawned.
	We may never, but the date of which this dawned, but when they continue to bulldoze through the lives and reputations and finances and peace of mind and family structure and careers of everyone who was supporting Trump.
	Right, exactly, exactly.
	But the other feature of the report, which I think is very dangerous, and I think it's really where the marker's been laid down, is is the notion that, yes, the Russians hacked the 2016 election.
	We are still with this based on the flimsiest of evidence.
	The FBI never ran its own forensics on the famous DNC server.
	And you have a fascinatingly credentialed group of former intelligence world experts, including a former tech director of the National Security Agency, William Binney, who actually designed a lot of these data collection programs that are who actually designed a lot of these data collection programs that are still in use today, actually saying there is no evidence that the The evidence is not credible.
	But you see the media still doubling down on that.
	You see the Mueller report doubling down on that.
	They're still trying to protect the deep state impetus for this investigation.
	And that is kind of the struggle that I see developing.
	And it concerns me because I can see us going forward, to use that horrible phrase that I should never utter, but moving on in terms of the story and how we react to it, accepting that.
	And that is just absolute.
	That cannot be.
	And I hope that people can be made aware of this.
	But if you notice, you're not seeing a lot of mainstream media interviews with William Binney. - No, and unfortunately we can't get many answers out of Seth Rich anymore, although I think we probably could.
	So, I'm going to just read a sentence from the book and let's take these bit by bit because this is the story arc that I think people really need to get.
	So, it starts with the Clinton campaign quote intelligence, dossier gate.
	Through the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private server, ServerGate, rigged the secret court system, FISAgate, to engage in domestic espionage against the GOP presidential campaign, SpyGate, and then, having failed utterly to tip the election to the woeful, corrupt, democratic presidential candidate, set forth to destroy the Trump presidency by a special counselor, MullerGate.
	Okay, so we've got DossierGate, FISAGate, ServerGate, SpyGate and MullerGate.
	Obviously, starting with DossierGate is really quite fascinating and I didn't quite follow this in one of the interviews that this is boomerang you need to do in order to spy domestically that you have to generate some sort of foreign security issue in order to be able to more easily get spy on people domestically.
	So, what was the purpose of DossierGate and how do you think it came to be?
	Well, I think the way we don't really, you know, this is still all, almost all speculation.
	We don't still know so many of these extremely key answers, but what we're looking at is this effort to concoct a scandal of, of Russian collusion and this outrageous kind of character assassination that I think would have withered and destroyed 99%, if not higher, of public figures.
	I mean, Donald Trump is singular in so many ways.
	And I think this incredible strength and courage that he has, it's kind of almost superhuman.
	Not many people know that orange is a bulletproof colour.
	Not many people know that.
	He has an advantage over pasty half-Irish people like me, but anyway, go on.
	So it's not true.
	So, so you have this interesting idea of they're going down.
	I think that one thing we need to back up and understand is that in Clinton world, dirty dossiers and all kinds of dirty tricks are our coin of the realm.
	It not to mix metaphors, but in terms of their, uh, elective successes, they have always, always relied on this kind of backs backstabbing.
	I mean, a lot of politics is very much like this and there are dirty tricks.
	And so on that are part of most campaigns.
	But the Clintons, of course, took it to a new level.
	And we do see some of the same actors from the old Clinton days returning to the scene of a new crime.
	And that would be with a dossier that has attracted less attention.
	But it was something put together by Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, who were certainly veterans of the Bill Clinton days.
	And I go into some of that in great detail, actually, because Derek Shearer, who is the brother of Cody Shearer, wrote a really frank letter about all the wonderful things he'd done in the dark arts of dirty tricks to the new president, Bill Clinton, back in 1992 as a means of trying to get him to give him a big job.
	So he was trying to show him really how much he really needed him.
	And so he goes through a lot of the way they do these things.
	We've seen other dossiers such as, do you remember when Dan Quayle Was accused of being a drug user and buyer as a senator and a law student.
	Well, that dossier, which there was tremendous investigation of, including by the DEA, including by 60 Minutes and other media organizations, could find nothing.
	That was a product of Cody Shearer.
	They tried to sort of drop that into the Bush-Quayle election cycle without too much luck, except for the fact that, yes, there were quite a lot of stories about it.
	They throw dirt, does it stick?
	So these are practiced smear artists.
	When we come to the 2016 campaign cycle, we have learned through reporting by people like Lee Smith of Real Clear Politics, we have learned that yes, Cody and Sidney were pushing another dossier that was tremendously like the Steele dossier, only at this point, 20 years later, as Clinton henchmen, Not even our corrupt, stinking corrupt media really felt comfortable going with it.
	This may be... Well, this is pre-BuzzFeed, of course, so... Well, it's pre-Steele dossier.
	Right, right.
	Steele dossier may indeed have been a reincarnation of this kind of Cody-Syd dossier with a British accent, with that old-school tie, with that British intelligence sort of élan, if that's what it is.
	And all of a sudden, it was something more important with this foreign agent or foreign officer involved.
	It's a lot of theater.
	It's a lot of manipulation.
	And more and more, we're finding how big this conspiracy really was.
	It included John McCain.
	It included his close associate, David Kramer, who's very involved in being an emissary of the dossier to the media.
	It was so It wasn't really a threat, it was a network of people that were trying to create this kabuki theater in order to manipulate the American people.
	It wasn't about getting at the truth about Donald Trump or exposing a threat to the United States.
	It had nothing to do with that.
	It was all about creating a spectacle that would destroy this counter-revolutionary figure who's trying to roll back this very socialistic world we live in, where nation-states disappear.
	And the nation-state is the bulwark against international socialism.
	Donald Trump, improbably, I don't know how, but he is the manifestation of the pushback against this effort that was never supposed to happen.
	Well, the how is social media, which is why they're clamping down on it so hard in preparation for Canadian elections this year and American elections next year.
	They don't want that to happen again.
	People have a voice.
	Well, we've got to stop that.
	That's no good.
	Right.
	So we get the dossier gate, which then allows the investigation domestically against political enemies.
	So help me connect that particular threat.
	Well, this is where you get to the heart of the constitutional threat.
	Because you see a number of senior Justice Department officials, FBI officials, using a fabricated piece of Democratic Party, um, they call it opposition research.
	It wasn't even research.
	I mean, somebody pointed out who was a veteran opposition researcher that it's supposed to be factual.
	So this was just a concoction.
	This was a smear that was paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to, um, pretend that it was credible intelligence, that it was something that, that, that warranted
	The extremely serious step of literally spying through surveillance on the Trump team and actually, and we don't know how this all went down, but actually inserting spies, informants from the FBI and CIA into the Trump campaign world, trying to get them closer and closer to the Trump circle.
	This is just absolutely, I mean, right there.
	is the explosive controversy alone, regardless of further ramifications.
	And this was discovered at the beginning of 2018.
	I think that the most important moment for this entire scandal, in terms of crystallizing both the fact that it was a scandal and there was no Russian collusion, was that moment, I believe it was October 2017, when a court ordered a bank to reveal
	The clients of Fusion GPS, which was the center creating this dossier, being the Perkins Coie law firm, which was the cutout for Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee campaign, paying the law firm to pay Fusion GPS to create this.
	Once you know that, the whole thing unravels in terms of being a complete fabricated operation against domestic political opposition.
	By the controlling party and bureaucracy, and this is why people talk about the deep state.
	These are deep state actors at work against the American people.
	Yeah, I'm thinking of it now as the red state, just based on your book, but maybe that's the next book.
	And so, yeah, that's important.
	As far as actionable intelligence goes, the dossier was complete garbage.
	It was unverified.
	There weren't people on the record.
	Christopher Steele had never met with any of these people and they were paid if they even ever existed.
	It was absolutely unverifiable.
	It's the writings in poop on the wall of a crazy person's cell in an asylum that some people think is somehow gospel handed down like the Ten Commandments to Moses.
	So it is radical garbage that is just paid for and fabricated out of whole cloth.
	Through that, of course, being able to start to spy on political opponents means that you can write anything you want, you can pay for anything you want, you can create anything out of whole cloth, and then you can just wave it in front of a visa court and you can just get to spy on people, which means that, you know, privacy is compromised, political integrity is compromised, you can put spies in political opponents
	Yes, exactly.
	And there are two points I would add to that.
	One is, and this is kind of an interesting little parallel to history.
	Back when Stalin was trying to consolidate his power, there was a very famous murder in the Soviet Union of a rival of Stalin's named Kirov.
	And this was the kickoff to what became known as the Blood Purges, where just a mania for trying Bolshevik officials, the old revolutionaries, waves and waves of people, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people were actually condemned to death under this terror that started with this murder.
	That murder later was discovered, and probably people knew at the time, was actually under Stalin's own order.
	So he created this situation whereby he could eliminate his political opposition.
	Well, let's think about the DNC server for a moment, because we've got this supposed Russian operation that hacked the DNC server, thereby creating this wave of hysteria that was supposed to destroy the political opposition.
	You've got this same mentality of creating artificial crisis to destroy political opposition.
	There is nothing American about it.
	If anyone believes in the Constitution, if anyone believes that you go on the hustings and try to get votes and try to win by the book to become president, for goodness sake, I mean, this is the most important position, the biggest race we have and all the rest of it.
	This is so perverse and perverted and subverted that, again, you go to the idea of who are these people?
	How did they get themselves even into this?
	There are people who do exactly what they said they were going to do, which is achieve power by any means necessary.
	I mean, the dossier gate thing is so mad because it's sort of the analogy I have in my head, tell me if you think it makes sense, is if I phone up the cops and I say, oh yeah, Bob, he stole my TV.
	Right?
	And they say, well, how do you know it was Bob?
	And I say, oh, I got a video and his fingerprints are all over the place.
	And then the cops say, OK, well, we'll come by and we'll check it out.
	And I say, no.
	No, no, no.
	I don't want you to come over and check it out.
	Just go arrest Bob and throw him in prison on my say-so.
	It's like, no, no, no.
	We really, really do have to come and dust for fingerprints, and we really want to see this video.
	And I'm like, no.
	You can't see any of it.
	I mean, that would never be a legal system that would stand any kind of moral scrutiny.
	But this idea, oh, no, we got hacked by Russia.
	We know.
	Can we have a look at the server?
	No.
	But give us the warrants anyway.
	No, and think of it.
	It was the FBI director at the time, James Comey, Telling Congress, I believe it was four times, in four different appearances before the House and Senate, admitting that the FBI forensics teams had never actually looked at the DNC server.
	That they had trusted this contractor that this law firm that was paying for the dossier also, Perkins Coie, had hired to look at things and also, by the way, replace every piece of computer and laptop and everything throughout the The DNC complex before anything was even announced.
	Well, I mean, what's he going to say?
	Well, you know, we asked nicely, but they said no.
	So, hey, what can we do?
	It's like, you know, you could just ask General Flynn what kind of powers the FBI have if they want to exercise them.
	If they wanted that server, they could have got it.
	And the people that destroyed evidence, they could have got them too.
	Exactly.
	They did not want to.
	So, again, you come back to this incredible conspiracy that, you know, you have a special counsel investigating nothing.
	While this conspiracy is allowed to fester, and perhaps, you know, I hope not, but the way these things all too often go, they, the conspirators, crawl back into the woodwork.
	We'll see if there's maybe one fall guy.
	Will Andrew McCabe, the deputy FBI director who is in legal jeopardy at this moment, will he be the one fall guy that would be absolutely a travesty?
	This is, again, because of Trump, this exposure Has come this moment of exposure that we never get has come to us.
	And you know, it's very difficult to, to, to follow it.
	Um, but I think it's, it's urgent because this, we don't know what command and control looks like.
	We don't know if it was foreign or domestic, honestly.
	I mean, what I, you know, having done the historical deep dives I've been doing, I always think back to say 1947 when Alger Hiss was just a respected Washington figure who had been a very senior, State Department official August, you know, the first Secretary General of the United Nations.
	And now he was the head of a major foundation before he was exposed as having been working the whole time for a foreign hostile power, namely the Soviet Union.
	We discover that one of these conspirators is working for a foreign power.
	Well, I won't be surprised.
	I mean, this, but you know, you have to start kind of putting things into context to even have that, that potential thought experiment in mind, which I think is very necessary because it's dangerous to have your president removed unconstitutionally in a coup.
	And we need to get to the bottom of who these people are and where their loyalties truly lie.
	And, you know, are they just homegrown Marxists and this is just a Marxist takeover?
	Maybe that's it.
	Are there foreign actors?
	We know we're beset, we're infiltrated up to our eyeballs, for example, by the Chinese.
	I mean, this is something that people are paying attention to a little bit now.
	You know, are they involved?
	Are the Russians involved?
	It looks so much like things we've seen.
	And when you actually start tying some of the actors in my little threads that go back through the decades, you see a continuity with this long-term assault on our nation.
	And it's, you know, it's very frightening.
	But again, what's more frightening to me at this point is that they will not be fully, Explain to us.
	Well, I think one of the purposes of the Mueller report too was to keep outsiders from the halls of power.
	Because one of the things when you see the extreme lengths to which they went to try and uproot the Trump presidency, you really get a sense of just how inoffensive to their interests prior Republican presidents were.
	Exactly, and of course Mueller worked for prior Republican presidents.
	I was really struck recently on reading He was FBI director a few days, he was made FBI director a few days before 9-11 back in 2001.
	And his behavior in terms of covering everything up and preventing the investigators from even knowing about a certain Saudi cell down in Sarasota, which has a lot of sibilance, but you know there was this Sarasota cell of Saudis that was hidden from the investigators until years later.
	That's just one example, but there was another example where an FBI agent, Colleen Rowley, was a whistleblower and she was describing this terrible situation whereby the FBI and the CIA could have prevented 9-11 had there been more attention paid to a number of the reports going forward.
	Well, what happened when she wrote that report?
	Mueller classified it.
	Was that to help the American people understand what happened and prevent it from happening again?
	No!
	It was to protect The Deep State.
	It was to protect the security forces.
	This is what he has done consistently, going back to his early days in the 1990s, when the late New York Times columnist, William Safire, when I was growing up, he was my favorite columnist.
	He did a lot of reportage in his weekly columns, or bi-weekly columns, for the New York Times.
	And he called Robert Mueller, back in about 1990 or so, he called him Eric Holder's gift to the Justice Department.
	So try that on for size.
	And Comey is considered his law enforcement twin.
	They both were protégés of Eric Holder.
	These men who have this Republican identity, strangely, have a lot of interesting political allies that you would not think they would have if they truly were on the more Republican side of the aisle.
	So it's a long history of suppression and control.
	and manipulation and that's why this political act of the special counsel I think is not laid to rest because the political act of filing the report.
	This is just a pivot basically.
	Do you think that there's anyone not compromised enough, not scared, not too scared, not embedded enough to be able to pivot and start to look at the potential criminality behind what's been going on?
	Well, I think that Devin Nunes, Representative Devin Nunes in the House, has been another hero of this whole thing.
	He seems to be very intent on continuing on in the investigation.
	Of course, he's in the minority now.
	I've noticed Rand Paul coming forward seeming very agitated about not letting things be laid to rest.
	I don't know the figures in the Justice Department.
	It's hard to imagine anyone is not compromised at this point at the senior levels.
	I mean, I'd like to see some people step forward.
	And do some whistleblowing on this.
	We have not seen that happen yet.
	It's a very good question.
	And I don't know, except for in the Congress doing its oversight, where this could happen.
	I don't think another special counsel should be.
	I'm done with special counsels.
	This is not constitutional.
	There's no oversight of them.
	It's a strange creature.
	It doesn't seem right.
	So this really needs to be addressed.
	Inside the Justice Department, inside the Congress, from the presidency, in the media.
	Is there media?
	There is some media that is honest here, but we need a whole lot more revelation and it needs to start with the Mueller report needs to be released.
	And the FISA warrants need to be released and every single other... We've been talking about that and they should have been out a long time ago in my opinion because we do need to see the, I assume, rather flimsy justifications for that and if the FISA court system was abused on the basis of I won't even say false information because when it's unverifiable to me, you can't use that as the basis for any kind of FISA court warrant.
	But if the FISA court system was abused for political purposes, that's damn close to a coup and that's damn close to treason in my opinion.
	Well, it is.
	I think it, I'm sure it, well, when I've talked to experts, legal experts who do this kind of thing for a living, one of the crimes that they are very certain we're talking about It's a very serious crime, obviously, and will someone be brought to court?
	In the red thread, I actually included the statute, what it is, and it is very much what we're talking about in terms of trying to overthrow, subvert the government.
	And it's a very serious crime, obviously.
	And will someone be brought to court?
	I mean, this becomes such an important question.
	And I don't know that our system is true enough at this point to work properly organized.
	We're so compromised.
	But again, it's an opportunity.
	I mean, this is a time of opportunity in that regard.
	But, you know, I don't know if it's too late.
	I don't know if we've got it in us to do it right.
	So the crisis continues.
	I mean, I think that the clearance or the admission that there was no collusion in this report, as we've been told, is really a tactical shift.
	It wasn't doing them any good on the Democrat side, on the anti-Trump side, and I think they decided to pull back.
	I don't think it was an attack of conscience or the active clearing of someone's name and saying, whoops.
	To me, there's got to be some larger strategy, whether it's because Trump is now fine with more and more legal immigration, whether they feel they have the demographics and the projections to take the presidency next year without it.
	There's some reason that's going on that has nothing to do with justice or a conscience or anything like that.
	Well, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the more they attacked him on this, the greater his support was to become.
	And then the other feature of that report that I think is very dangerous is that it doubles down on this notion that yes, we were attacked by Russia in 2016, that there was a Russian hack.
	And of course, Robert Mueller indicted a couple of groups of Russians for no reason in terms of these, you know, the social media threat, which is ridiculous.
	And then, you know, in a campaign where they spent a billion dollars and the Russians took out, you know, $50,000 worth of Facebook ads or whatever it was.
	It's ridiculous.
	And then the more serious one was the indictment of the Russian intelligence agents, sort of out of a phone book, it seems.
	But again, going to this idea that there is not credible evidence that it was a Russian hack.
	But I'd like to compare that just to show you what Mueller really is.
	If you remember back in 2010, when there was the uncovering of a ring Of genuine, straight-up Russian penetration agents, known as the illegals, who were rolled up and sent back to Russia without being debriefed, without being pressured to switch sides, without the normal kind of process whereby you actually earn something, win something from this kind of a 10-year investigation.
	They just threw it all away.
	The reasons given had to do with one of them in particular was getting too close to a sitting cabinet official who was Hillary Clinton.
	What did Robert Mueller, the FBI chief, do then?
	Did he resign in this terrible moment of politicization of our national security?
	Well, no, his FBI sent them home.
	I mean, this is the kind of, he's a political animal.
	So this, he's a protector of the deep state.
	And I think that this is sort of his main goal.
	And I think that at this point, given Trump's resilience, I think that that is where they are at this moment, regrouping to protect from further exposure the fact that so many people in this bureaucracy were involved in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the government, the presidency.
	That's kind of what it feels like to me at this point, which is again why the ideological motivations I think are so important when you see a consistent thread of communism, socialism, progressivism, all of those hard left Marxist forms of thought in the actual conspirators across the, just across the board.
	Everyone I've been able to peel back is a consistent ideological champion of anti-constitutional, anti-American politics.
	And, you know, that's very scary because a lot of them are at the top of the government.
	And if, if they get away with this, it only escalates from here.
	Like there's no, whew, I didn't get caught stealing that candy bar, I guess I'll never steal a candy bar again.
	Everything is a test case with the hard leftists.
	Everything is a test case and everything is an escalation.
	They're like octopi trying to feel their way into coral.
	They just check every nook and cranny for a weakness, they keep moving, they keep probing.
	And this is a huge probe, this is unprecedented.
	And of course, when you look at what the left did, I think mostly as a result of his work exposing communists, what they did to Nixon for something absolutely inconsequential relative to this, which many democrat presidents had done before, bugging of opposition.
	You know, if the bugging of the opposition is really bad, how about full-court press spying on everything they do, both physically and electronically?
	That is an enormous, enormous step.
	And people have this odd belief that institutions are somehow more than the will of the people in them or the will of the people they govern.
	You know, the Constitution is a piece of paper.
	It does not, of itself, do anything.
	If it is a reflection of the will of the people, then it has some motive power and juice but if you just everyone sits back and says well it's okay because we have a constitution it's like no no no that's not how that's not a republic if you can keep it right if you're willing to to work to keep it so with that in mind what would you suggest because i never want to leave people with this sense of
	Massive forces far overhead battling good and evil and you get the popcorn and you cross your fingers and you hope for the best.
	What is it that you think that people can do so that we're going to get them to read your book?
	Is the audible version out?
	Yes.
	Okay, so the audiobook is available on Audible.
	I'll link to it below.
	So once people have read it, very, very important, obviously they should talk about it with people.
	What practical steps do you think that consumers of this can do to ensure the best chance for the good guys to win?
	Well, I think there's a very big role for people to play.
	I mean, I'm not being Pollyanna-ish in this.
	Our representatives need to know How important it is that we uncover everything we can uncover about this absolute black mark on our history, which is this terrible conspiracy and, you know, rolling coup.
	I mean, if he's still standing, that that's just, you know, that's that's really a miracle at this point.
	So this is a moment where overwhelming support for your representative and senator to Continue looking at this and bringing them in.
	In the Senate, they can still subpoena on the Republican side.
	And just exposing this and just not letting it go and understanding the crucial nature of what we are living through and how it is that a president who seeks to restore the necessities of nationhood has come under this kind of attack By those who wish to dissolve our nationhood.
	I mean, it's that, it's that black and white in terms of what we've been looking at, living through and trying to understand.
	So I noticed Karl Rove, who, who, you know, Mr. Never Trump, he called Trump a moron who wouldn't even rise out of the third tier of the Republican field in 2016.
	So that's his great political prognostication skills at work.
	He was in the Wall Street Journal just this week talking about it's time to move on.
	The Mueller report is done, and now we have to get back to governing the country.
	It's like, no.
	This is governing the country.
	If we don't rectify this, there is no government of the people, by the people, for the people, ever again.
	It's over.
	And I think that it's that important.
	Good.
	Well, I really, really appreciate your time.
	The book is fantastic.
	It's an easy read.
	It's a very powerful read, and it will illuminate the longer threads of history into the current manifestation, this eruption, really, that has occurred in American politics from, I think, Slow-moving, somewhat dormant, but ever-expanding hard leftism within the US state.
	And the book, of course, is the red thread.
	I'll put a link to it below.
	Pick it up.
	Listen to it.
	Talk about it with people.
	Post about it.
	Share it on Twitter.
	Share it on Facebook.
	While you still can.
	And write to people.
	Write to congressmen.
	Make it a part of your conversation.
	And let me know what you think of it, because it has a lot of shocking information.
	There's one thing you didn't say about it.
	It's very short.
	They're short, tiny.
	Everyone can read it very quickly, which is really why I wanted to write it the way I did.
	I wanted it to – it's more like long-form journalism in a sense just because it's not going to bog anybody down.
	There's so much – you know what's driving me crazy are the release of all these transcripts that go on for hundreds of pages.
	It's not like that.
	Well, it is short unless you get lost in the undergrowth of the footnotes, which are all fascinating themselves and which will definitely expand the book beyond.
	But no, it's a great place to start and it's a great place to just Really learn about everything that's going on because it is a make-or-break moment in American history.
	There is exposure to these kinds of crimes, there is punishment to push back against it, or the next time it's going to be even worse and infinitely harder to push back against.
	So, thank you again, Diana West.
	The book is The Red Thread, a really, really enjoyable book, a great conversation.
	Thank you so much.
	Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
	Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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