With the news of the day so terribly bleak, I turned to the New York Times's books to watch in this month of February for a quick, tonic blast of agit prop. My goodness, though; what unexpected comedic genius in these cascading cliches -- a real gift. Thanks, Woke Ones!

The following opening lines are truly copied verbatim.

Amnesty, by Aravind Adiga (Scribner's): Ever since his refugee application was denied ...

Apartment, by Teddy Wayne (Bloomsbury): It's 1996, and Wayne's achingly lonely narrator is enrolled in Columbia's MFA program ...

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann (Random House): Two fathers, one from Israel and one form Palestine, are linked by their shared grief ...

The Cactus League, by Emily Nemens (Farrar, Straus & Giroux): This debut...

Read More »

 

I deeply regret to report that our dear friend and great patriot Phil Haney, former DHS officer, intelligence expert and courageous truth-teller about Islam, has died violently in California yesterday. The initial reports I am hearing and also reading on social media is that he was shot and killed near San Francisco. I will post more details when they are confirmed.

UPDATE 1:20 pm ET: John Guandolo is reporting the following: "Preliminary investigation has ruled Phil’s death a suicide."  

Given that findings of "suicide" in our time have become synomous with "Arkancide" and other framed and fixed murders, above all we owe Phil a vigorous investigation and vetting of the evidence. 

RIP, friend.  

UPDATE: 1:36 pm ET Just came across this on Twitter.

...

Read More »

There was so much more to say that we recorded a second interview:

Frontpagemag recently posted a story about a letter Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote on behalf of Robert Meeropol and his family to President Barack Obama in which she asked Obama to issue a presidential proclamation exonerating Meeropol's mother, Ethel Rosenberg.

Yes, that Ethel Rosenberg. Along with husband Julius, Ethel Rosenberg and a ring of communist espionage agents did whatever they could (along with many others) to make sure Josef Stalin had the atomic bomb for his arsenal.

This was not just about Kremlin bragging rights. Archive records show that possession of "the Bomb" gave Stalin the confidence to trigger the Korean War. Further, other technologies stolen by the "Rosenberg Ring" would be weaponized against Americans in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The carnage, pain, destruction and loss unleashed on the world by these secret agents of Stalin is beyond...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times

When President Donald Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he believes the Democrats’ frontrunner, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is a communist, the president clarified “you could say socialist,” but then again, “I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist.”

As the pundits trip over poli-sci-class definitions, my question is what’s the difference?

As far as freedom-lovers go, safeguarding our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, there is none. To be sure, communists and socialists argue and split hairs. They fight and break heads. But they also work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination of collectivism.

...

Read More »

Listen here for my interview with Frank and here with Audrey. 

Audrey and I also discuss PBS's agit prop attack on Joseph McCarthy.   

I have finally developed an axiom about Sen. Joseph McCarthy: The more one learns about McCarthy -- facts, not the catechism of lies continuously recited like some demonic liturgy -- the more one despises the mindset that reviles him.

If that sounds harsh, it is not a hasty formulation. In fact, after many years of thinking about McCarthy matters, it strikes me as the most natural reaction to the thinking of writers and educators who don't want to know better, and the politicians who echo them. This mindset -- "conventional wisdom" -- fills the atmosphere with so much static, and gives cover to "experts" whose specialty is strangling the life out of truth. 

So widespread is this mindset, however, that it is widely shared by notable American conservatives. These are McCarthy's latter-day allies and supporters --  that is, were they ever wake up from a chronic case of brainwashing (inspired by Stalin's Kremlin) and realize it. Until then, they wander the public square, participating in communist-inspired rituals  of anti-communist revilement. McCarthy destroyed innocent lives ... bullied free-thinkers ... didn't have a list ... never found a communist ... unleashed "McCarthyism."  From the anti-communist perspective, the spectacle of "lost" allies, marching in step with the opposition while chanting its disinformation, is a strategic disaster.    

...

Read More »

Nicolae Ceausescu and Robert Maxwell in happier days

--

"Who were Armand Hammer and Robert Maxwell? Agents who became businessmen or businessmen who became agents?"

So asks the late Vladimir Bukovsky in his capstone work, Judgment in Moscow. 

Bukovsky's question arose as he considered the documentation he had before him on the Soviet Union's secret financial dealings with Western communists, both in cold cash (since 1969 "something to the tune of $400 million"), and, more intriguing,...

Read More »

 

Now at The Epoch Times

Christianity Today, the magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956, called, in this week before Christmas, for Donald Trump's removal from office.

Franklin Graham quickly released a statement on Twitter (above) in reply: "I hadn't shared who my father @BillyGraham voted for in 2016, but because of @CYMagazine's article, I felt it necessary to share now. My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.

Amen.

It is a beautiful statement; however, I never for a moment doubted that Billy Graham voted for President Trump. Graham's vote for Trump was a given for important reasons and deep beliefs, which,...

Read More »

It is amazing to learn how much the East German intelligence agency Stasi spied on and influenced British politics. The Stasi was a kind of branch office for the KGB, a placeholder for Moscow (like Ukrainian operators would seem to be a placeholder for Moscow today), and, according to Anthony Glees, the top British expert on the subject, "Britain and especially London were riddled with Stasi spies of one kind or another." 

Glees' quotation is from his 2003 book, The Stasi Files: East Germany's Secret Operations Against Britain, which focuses on the decade spanning 1979 to 1989, the year that East Germany dissolved itself. For ten years, from 1992 to 2002, scholars like Glees were able to study such nefarious matters inside the the Stasi archive, which, for that golden-opportunity-decade, was "the only security and intelligence service archive in the world ... open to scholars." 

...

Read More »

In 2011, Fiona Hill was seated next to Putin at the Valdai conference in Moscow for the second year  in a row.

---

Part 2 is here. 

I have been trying to think of the best word to describe Russia expert Fiona Hill's worldview. 

Assuming "non-partisan" is out, and "transcendent" inadequate, it may be best to turn away from the political firestorms of the Schiff show to focus on something less combustible....

Read More »

The Chairman was riveted

---

On with Frank Gaffney, making sense (trying to) of the anti-Trump conspiracy in its hot mess impeachment phase.  

Listen or download here.

Now at The Epoch Times

From Sidney Powell's Flynn filing of October 24, 2019:

"The defense has requested the phone records of James Clapper to confirm his contacts with Washington Post reporter David Ignatius -- especially on January 10, 2017, when Clapper told Ignatius in words to the effect of "take the kill shot on Flynn."

If that order sounds like something out of the criminal underworld, welcome to the Deep State, which is not too deep anymore, writhing and flexing in plain sight.

While Clapper was allegedly targeting Gen. Mike Flynn secretly through Washington Post columnist Ignatius, we know he was also targeting...

Read More »

Part 1 is here

--

We now turn from disquisitions on deception in Part One to the open book that is Russia expert Fiona Hill -- at least according the prepared remarks she delivered to the Adam Schiff "impeachment inquiry."

I take great pride in the fact that I am a non-partisan foreign policy expert, who has served under three different Republican and Democratic presidents. I have no interest in advancing the inquiry in any particular direction except toward the truth. (Emphasis in the original.)

So it was...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times

---

This week, the towering anti-communist dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was laid to rest in a London cemetery. In Washington, American democracy threw dirt on itself.

Impervious to the irony, the Democrats of the House of Representatives staged another fake impeachment "show trial" in its coup like no other to thwart the anti-communist will of the American electorate that sent Donald Trump to the White House. 

The battle is not drawn in such terms; they have been taken from us. But to understand the...

Read More »

Here is the op-ed from The Epoch Times, also here: Questions for Lt. Col. Vindman

Now at The Epoch Times

I recently picked up and was quickly hooked by Not Seeing Red: American Librarianship and the Soviet Union (1917-1960), a 2002 book by author and Ph.D. Stephen Karetzky. Sure, the topic sounds esoteric, but in this era of "deplatforming" and social media censorship, it is hotly relevant. Lauded by Paul Hollander and M. Stanton Evans, this is a book that might turn out to be a sort of early history of de-platforming and its enablers. 

Tackling decades of what we might call...

Read More »

The soft treachery of low information journalism.

Dear Free Beacon,

In “CNN Reporter: Trump Tweets Worse Than McCarthyism,” David Rutz writes that Sen. McCarthy was censured in 1954 "for his relentless charges that Soviet and communist spies had infiltrated various American institutions.” 

As is the case with about 99 p/c of what is said and written about Joseph McCarthy, this statement is untrue and grossly misleading to readers. 

While McCarthy himself would have been the first to point out that he was targeted by his political opponents for his “relentless” (and very successful*) efforts to expose Communists embedded in the US government, he was not, in fact, censured for them. 

Originally, there were under consideration a whopping 46 censure charges; however, just one of these charges came to a vote. According to this single charge,...

Read More »

Amb. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick: the People's expert witness.

--

Now at The Epoch Times

--

Sharyl Attkisson delivered a much-needed civics lesson this week. She writes:

Under the U.S. Constitution, it is the president of the United States who determines foreign policy. How can President Trump be “at odds with foreign policy” when he’s the one who determines it?…

Good question. Short answer: He can't be. The dirty little secret that is the complicating factor is that the government all around President Trump, unaffectionately known as "the Swamp," is a grotesque, post-Constitutional...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times

Halloween is over but Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's mask is still on. That's because his media and political patrons are doing everything they can to keep it from slipping.

They hold up his uniform, his ranger tab, his Purple Heart, his immigrant status, to create a facade that is not only impervious to questions but withering to them. How dare anyone question Vindman's committment, his loyalty to this country? Look at his uniform, his ranger tab, his Purple Heart, his immigrant status. 

It is a thin disguise. There are grave reasons to scrutinize and question Vindman's behavior,  regardless of whether he is a decorated veteran, an openly partisan Obama holdover, an immigrant from the old USSR, or all of the above.

The...

Read More »

Barack Obama and Robert De Niro and Tim Cook had dinner together last week in New York City.

So, it was like this: A veteran cadre, a Russian oligarch and a Beijing education official walk into a bar .... 

The following is a masthead editorial from the Morning Herald of Uniontown, PA, of August 19, 1938. It encapsulates a few of the little-remembered highlights of the first two decades of the Soviet-led assault on our nation's character.  

Bear in mind that today, one hundred years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, communism is the ideological inspiration of the whole slate of Democrat Pary presidential candidates.  

Vladimir Bukovsky (1942-2019) and Robert Conquest (1917 -2015)

Last night, at the 42nd Annual Pumpkin Papers Irregulars Dinner, I delivered the following remarks to honor the memory of Vladimir Bukovsky.

I never had the joy of meeting Vladimir Bukovsky in person. 

We connected over attacks against my book American Betrayal because they were so similar to attacks against his own work. He and his colleague Pavel Stroilov co-wrote two essays about the book and this phenomenon.

For me, of course, this was a very special bond.

Many of us are familiar with Bukvosky’s heroic story. Co-founder of the Soviet dissident movement, Bukovsky spent nearly 12 years inside Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals before his release to the West in 1976. He was 33. 

He threw himself into his role as an educator about the dangers of communism...

Read More »

The news I have been dreading comes out of England tonight: Vladimir Bukovsky has died. He was 76.

Now that Bukovsky is no more on this earth with the rest of us mortals, the obituaries, like so many doves, will be released to mark his passage out of our lives and into our memories.

I think I have always known that no matter how "prepared" one might be, this moment would be overwhelming. How do we mark the consequence and courage of such an extraordinary man who chose to lead his life in outspoken opposition to evil, who chose to sacrifice years of his life in Soviet labor camps and psychiatric hospitals rather than submit to communist slavery? The unflinching heroism, the giant scale of battle, the enormity of achievment was for Vladimir Bukovsky life's routine, and thus defies the normal sort of reckoning at life's end. The quandary lies in the colossal metaphysical...

Read More »

It's time for my monthly check-in with Audrey Russo -- the fastest 33 minutes in radio!

Listen here. 

On with Frank Gaffney discussing the anti-democratic (small "d") nature of the anti-Trump conspiracy.

Delighted to go on with Michael Savage yesterday to weave a red thread or two.

I can't believe I never noticed this. Then again, it's not as if the business partnership of Robert de Niro and the Agalarovs is widely reported. This partnership between de Niro and the Putin-favored oligarch family is certainly not as widely reported as de Niro's psychotic anti-Trump ravings, which is exactly the point of this commentary.

The fact is, Robert de Niro's rants needs a rating. No, not just a triple-X for the profanity that flows in true Method style -- or in the way of Pavolv's dog -- at the thought of Donald Trump. Robert de Niro needs another kind of rating; a disclaimer -- or, better, a warning.

Warning: This triple-X-rated rant against Donald J. Trump is not only the ravings of an Academy Award wining actor, but also of a business partner of the Agalarovs. 

Yes, those Agalarovs -- the Putin-connected-oligarch-family that set...

Read More »

 

Writing on the Biden campaign "demand" that networks prohibit Rudy Giuliani from coming on their platforms and making his case for the president, Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, writes:

Trump Derangement Syndrome is causing Democrats to expose their totalitarian impulse.  Taking a lesson from communist tyrants, the Biden campaign outed itself as taking the route of silencing rather than responding to its critics. 

And then:

It revealed for all to see that that the Biden campaign regards the media as allies upon whom it can make demands in the expectation that its wishes will be followed.

Doesn't Lifson remember when the...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times

On July 24, 2019, all through the day, as Robert Mueller testified before Congress, the elation of President Trump's supporters continued to build. Mueller's dismal performance, start to finish, only underscored the Special Counsel report takeaway of "no collusion." It was time to celebrate, or so it seemed. The Federalist called the event: "A complete disaster for Democrats." Breitbart crowed: "Robert Mueller Testimony Backfires on Democrats as Republicans Move in for the Kill." 

My own take, both as a Trump supporter and analyst of...

Read More »

What a week.

Happily, got to talk over some of the events with Audrey Russo.

Listen here,

I am wondering if it is possible that President Trump knows full well how high the Swamp is all around him, not just outside his administration but throughout his administration. If so, I am wondering if it is also possible that he believes that if there is any hope of exposing the anti-Trump, anti-American conspiracy still at work against him and the nation, the only accessible proof lies outside normal government channels, maybe outside Washington itself.

That's ridiculous, the automatic reply is. He's the president, isn't he?

All the president has to do is unredact and release the deepest darkest secrets of the Swamp to neutralize its powers: the FISA applications, the Page-Strzok convos, the "lost" Clinton emails (which, of course, are not lost at all but closely held by NSA), and on and on to the Saudi-Bush-9/11 everything, the POW/MIA archives, the whole of the Kennedy assassination files, the works. 

...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times.

I'm posting the link to my May 15, 2019 Red Thread radio interview with Sean Hannity and Gregg Jarrett (with thanks to Vlad Tepes) because I suddenly realized that this 10-plus minute segment from the beginning of the summer makes a nice bookend to a short passage I find in Andy McCarthy's late-summer release, Ball of Collusion.

...

Read More »

Now at The American Spectator: 

"Why Does the New York Times Have a Race Editor?"

Sitting down to write, I ask myself: Am I being fair? Is it according to Hoyle, kosher, and on the up and up to take aim at such a target, cavorting unaware in the complacency of impervious consensus? After all, this is the A-section of the New York Times, where summer games for social justice warriors don’t end; they just continue on B17. Rebels and scofflaws are not just uninvited; they are not imagined.

And yet here I am on page A2. It has been redesigned since my last, non-virtual visit, the new architecture supporting a self-referential echo chamber of left-wing hang-ups and obsessions. The agitprop may be old news, but the look is different. Like industrial chic, all of...

Read More »

Another nice surprise I find on my return is Jeff Nyquist's review of The Red Thread.

Here it is in full:

Diana West latest book, The Red Thread, teaches us to swim in the details instead of drowning in the lies. Before describing Diana’s details, it is useful to establish the context in which her work appears.



In terms of the “big picture,” an ideological war is taking place throughout society, on every level, across every discipline. In the old Soviet Union they used to say “we live in the era of the transition between capitalism and socialism.” It was also billed as a transition between belief in God and a belief in the power of man.

...

Read More »

 

Returning from several weeks away, I was delighted to find copies of the new Brazilian publication of American Betrayal with a preface by the illustrious author and philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, "one of the primary voices of Brazil's conservative revival," as Jeff Nyquist has written. The books were accompanied by an extremely kind note from the publisher, who writes:

I am sending you two copies of your book American Betrayal translated into Portuguese -- "Traicao Americana: o ataque secreto aos Estados Unidos". I want to...

Read More »

Here is a stack of recent interviews, in order of appearance, with Jason Goodman, Audrey Russo and Frank Gaffney, all of them getting at the same crisis from slightly different angles. 

Guest-hosting The Intelligence Assessment with Jason Goodman here.

On The Audrey Russo Show here.

On Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney here.

Now at The Epoch Times

There is a sinister war underway, a war of mental conditioning, as a new united front of communists, socialists, and liberals in media and politics attack the American mind and soul as something immoral and hateful—something to be reviled as “racist” in every tweet and every news story, and demonized as “white nationalist” over every airwave, all to a point of reflexive consensus in the public square.

The ravages of history bear witness to the heinous results of eerily similar campaigns of public revilement in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and other totalitarian echo chambers. Should the tens of millions of Americans today and every day lashed as “racists” and “white nationalists”—that is, Republicans, Democrats,...

Read More »

I went on with Sam Sorbo this week (listen below) to walk through the Left's new psy op in progress against President Trump and the American people who support him and his agenda to reinstate America as a nation-state before migratory invasions and other hallmarks of  globalism wholly subsume it. 

In the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings, the Left has launched a new and especially vicious offensive, climbing over the dead and wounded to enage in a massive bait-and-switch propaganda campaign. Before the facts are even known about these crimes -- and despite the facts that are known about these crimes -- the Left is in full-despicability-mode, recklessly and unforgiveably blaming President Trump for the violence while -- Diabolical Plot...

Read More »

I was happy to pick up The Red Thread this week with Marc Bernier, radio host and director of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's President's Speaker Series. Marc actually launched American Betrayal back in 2013 with my debut appearance at the President's Speaker Series to discuss the book. To the newly newsy point, Marc also interviewed Ellen Ratner and...

Read More »

Note to Party Line Disseminators:

Comrades:

In the new, Pavlovian "propaganda climate" that has finally been achieved, not by position papers of our lame Party Line Candidates, but by an anti-immigrant manifesto linked to the El Paso massacre, and, yes, successfully exploited by Party Line Disseminators across the MSM, it is crucial to our mission to replace #MAGA with "white nationalism" and Trump with any of the Party Line Candidates, however pathetic, to maintain the Party Line at all costs and at all times.

Thus, the New York Times is to be severely chastised. NYT, fight on to become worthy again of your prized Duranty Pulitzer! 

Party-Line Dissemintaors on Twitter, your contributions to the glorious anti-America cause are noted. Keep up the good work, especially in suppressing the manifesto's overlap...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times



Writing about the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in today's Wall Street Journal, Bard history professor Sean McMeekin makes the point that the "heroic yet doomed" battle against Nazi occupation is "almost forgotten in the West." 

He asks:

Why, then, is this shattering episode in European history almost forgotten in the West? Perhaps because the battle for Warsaw does not have a happy ending. Germany’s eventual defeat did not mark the liberation of Poles but the beginning of another brutal occupation by the Communists. This unsettles the narrative of World...

Read More »

Many thanks to Stefan Molyneux for inviting me on his show (watch below) to walk through the epic failure at this week's Mueller hearings on the part of the GOP to nail to the wall the fraudulent basis for the entire Mueller investigation -- for that matter, the fraudulent basis of the entire Trump-Russia deception. I am talking about the Big Lie that Russia hacked the election to help make Donald Trump president. After Robert Mueller's testimonies, this delegitimizing Big Lie stands unquestioned because no GOP member dared to overturn the foundational rock of the anti-Trump conspiracy by asking: Why did the FBI fail to investigate the DNC server that the DNC claimed was attacked by Russia in the summer...

Read More »

Now at The Epoch Times

I am certainly no stranger to the far end of a limb, but this time, I am really out there. I watched the Mueller hearings and despaired. I saw the Original Sin of Trump Russia -- "Russia hacked the DNC," shaped by time and messaging into "Russian interference in 2016 on behalf on Donald Trump" -- enter the record, accepted and even regurgitated by the GOP.

But Mueller gave a foggy performance! He never even read his own report! Impeachment is dead! The response by the estimable Mollie Hemingway typifies conservative satisfaction.



I rubbed my eyes, tried to smile, but it didn't work. I still felt snookered and betrayed...

Read More »

It is 2:17 pm ET and I have watched Robert Mueller testify for many hours before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees up to this moment. I now despair of any single Republican pulling the pin on the anti-Trump conspiracy. That is, no Republican has been willing to ask the basic, elemental Russia-gate question: Why should We, the People rely on a redacted, draft report by Crowdstrike, a DNC contractor with a spotty record, co-founded by a Mueller protege named Shawn Henry, for the sensational finding that Russia hacked the DNC? Such a finding has serious political and national security implications, as we all well and wearily know. Acording to Crowdstrike -- but not according to FBI investigators or any other government or independent investigators -- Russia "hacked" the DNC, and, the story goes, gave the "stolen" emails to Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, thus "interfering" with the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

...

Read More »