Most attempts to make sense of the Trump campaign and "Russian influence" have been confounded from the start by an appalling lack of context when it comes to understanding the history and mechanisms of "Russian influence" over the past century. Unceasing efforts to supress this mechanism and history, some of which is examined minutely in American Betrayal, by the political establishment, by the media and academia, have gone a long toward the creation of what we might think of as the historical Swamp. Here lies a still-hidden history of corruption and collusion with Moscow and other totalitarian centers, all of which continues to raise questions about the motivations of those who spray lies all around like a smokescreen to prevent its denizens and their actions from shown in the light. They, some notable few of them, surely, are protecting something, a "narrative" of control depending on falsehood and crime, on which  an illegitimate kind of power rests that is mortally haunted by the truth.

I am not talking about the overtly, overweeningly political designs of elected officials and bureacrats deep in the government and their allies in the media who are intent on using the issue to hack at the Trump presidency, and not safeguard the American people. All of these culprits may be easily identified by their refusal to examine Kremlin influence logically, as it has subverted both parties. I am rather talking about American citizens who even have a "good" college education (read: indoctrination) and are just trying to make sense of the headlines. They smell a rat, plenty of them, but cannot turn to their books, cannot listen to "experts" to gain any knowledge of this "lost" era. I think "stolen" is a far better term. The crime -- stolen history -- has been that successful.

Thus, when a reporter breathlessly explains that Putin's plot against the US has been found  -- in a paper at a Russian government think tank! -- few are able to assess such silliness. The idea that Russian intelligence,  

Such context and understanding were the hard won gains of a very long war -- a very long war against communist infiltration -- waged at great cost by some of America's greatest elected officials, ex-communists, ex-agents, and intelligence professionals and experts.

It is a war the anti-communists lost. Today, no matter how much information becomes known about the depth and breadth of penetration and influence of networks of Kremlin-directed intelligence armies, the anti-anti-communist narrative is unchanged, continually reenforced by the surviving "deans" of Cold War studies, such as the Haynes and Klehrs who, as Klehr wrote as recently as 2013, slander McCarthy as a demagogue who harmed anti-communism even as he tk ...