It is Quarterly Fund-Raising Week at Gates of Vienna, indispensable chronicle of the counter-jihad and other battles to defend Western Civ, such as it is (do please donate here). That means we are treated to ruminations by the Baron and Dymphna, both of whom have the finest minds and a store of humanity, wisdom and wit to draw upon. The theme of this fund-raising week is GoV's fifteen-year-history. Baron writes: "Each day Dymphna and I have grabbed hold of one part or another of the elephant of what we’ve been doing for the past decade and a half, in an effort to provide some insight into how we got where we are now."  

Yesterday, Dymphna grabbed hold of American Betrayal, which now comes attached with The Red Thread. Let me explain the GoV connection.

Readers of American Betrayal may recall -- how many times have I started out with that phrase! -- the disinformation campaign against the 2013 book, its forces marshalled and led by David Horowitz and Ron Radosh. The ensuing battle created battle lines, and battle lines created light, high-beaming friend and foe, braveheart and coward, with groups of by-standers looking on in various degrees of discomfort the shadows couldn't hide. At the very front, Gates of Vienna was friend and braveheart -- and also indefatigable chronicler, as this extensive list of essays demonstrates.       

I was happily surprised and proud to see that as GoV is reflecting on its history this week, American Betrayal is a part of it.

Dymphna writes:

A quiet day on the donations front, but the cumulative amounts are respectable. I have every confidence that the pace will pick up as the week draws down; we’re moving past the curve even as I ponder our history.

That’s something I do all the time — think about our unlikely journey in the ether (who could have guessed?) — which is what led me to suggest GoV’s history as a theme for this quarter. And by “history” I meant the eruptions and disruptions we have witnessed, and those in which we found ourselves enmeshed. Those disruptions served as nodal points which caused us to grow a carapace. No wonder the Baron’s totem is a tortoise.

In our fifteen years of existence, Gates of Vienna has seen its share of ugliness; in a less-than-perfect world that will always be the case. No doubt all of you have your own wounds to prove my contention. As the curtain is drawn back from the guys in the back, impatient with the slow pace of normal entropy, who want to run things into chaos even faster, one becomes inured (mostly) to the slings and arrows. But in the final analysis, any “to-be-or-not-to-be” for Gates of Vienna lies not in our efforts but with you, our readers, who decide to give or not to give. We ain’t running ads on our pages, come what may. The Gates will shut rather than bear those jumpy advertisements demanding that readers buy more stuff. Ugh.

One topic high on the list of Historical Ugly on our website was the brouhaha brought about by the demented efforts to shun and marginalize Diana West for daring to write about the 20th-century history of Soviet incursions into American government. One of the fellows who led the charge against American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character was Ron Radosh. Now, in his NeverTrumper decline, he’s been outed finally as the leftist he always was. It’s never too late for a turncoat to turn that jacket over again. Surprisingly, it is his boyhood friend David Horowitz, a fellow Red-Diaper baby, who has led the charge against Radosh, just as he’d led the charge against Diana West, using Radosh to do so. Is that leftist behavior, or what?

Now Horowitz has turned to his employee, Daniel Greenfield, in order to bury his BFF, Ron Radosh. It really is true: wait long enough, and things transmogrify, especially in the sphere of perfervid political ideology. Radosh is a NeverTrumper who decided to revert rather than suffer the ignominy of our current American president. He has company on the Right. Many of those formerly Conservative NTs are sawing off the tree limbs on which they precariously perch. Hard to make a posh living as a public intellectual when you huffily exit the train… and it continues without you.

That original attempt (in 2013ff) to marginalize and destroy Diana West was coordinated by those two Red Diaper babies, Horowitz and Radosh, with lots of help from the National Review and huge echoing silences from those who should have defended her. Now, in old age, the long friendship of those Red Diaper boys has unraveled. I almost feel sorry for them.

Almost, but not quite, given their level of vitriolic animosity toward a conservative writer who spent two long years researching a book she didn’t realize she’d need to write. Her sin of uncovering the Soviet incursions into American government was beyond the pale for ex-lefties. What she learned certainly left her shaken. Much as Emmet Scott’s book on Islam caused a paradigm shift in those who read it, so did Diana West’s uncovering of the reality of America’s sometimes perfidious role in World War II. How many millions died because of our actions? How many American POW soldiers were forced into Siberia by the actions of those in charge? They were never heard from again.

You can understand why They wanted to shut her down. As the Baron said at the time, some Planet X was exerting an influence none of us could see. In fact, that entity is still obscured.

We entered into the fray for Diana West back then because we had observed her integrity, and her incisive analysis proved our estimation. The way in which David Horowitz went about his attempt to marginalize her definitive work in numerous personal attacks left us no choice but to defend it in turn. So we did, for years. In fact, here’s the whole megillah, collected for posterity.

And now she’s back, this time to explain the Soviet influences still present in our government. After the mortal threat of Donald Trump’s most unlikely election, those swamp creatures were determined to take him down. That they didn’t succeed gives one hope.

'The Red Thread' by Diana WestMs. West’s new book The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, came out before Mueller turned in his nothing burger to the Justice Department. [Someone needs to do the tee shirt: “Two years and $30mil later and all I get is the Mueller Report?”] Nonetheless, it is a crucial handbook for sorting out the players and their lifelong leftist/Marxist connections.

The Red Thread is short and deadly. As usual, Ms. West has done her homework, but since she ran her marathon in Betrayal this book can serve as her victory lap. By now she is a virtuoso who can recite this stuff in her sleep. As a result, The Red Thread is a brief, compelling book. It is a guidebook, a warning of what we were/are dealing with in our fight against the permanent bureaucracy. If the latter were but dedicated Americans, they’d still be a problem due to their outsized influence to re-make our laws via regulation.

But they are not patriots; many of them are frankly treasonous true believers in socialism and redistributionist dogma. It simply took the advent of a maverick like Donald Trump to scare the bejeezus out of them and send them scurrying. Scared dogmatists are loose cannons. Soon of these apparatchiks will begin firing on one another from within their circle to save themselves.

Rather than give you a précis of the book, here is an exposition by Matt Bracken of The Red Thread, and his brief interview with Diana:

I hope it motivates you to read the book for yourself. And I hope you find her work as compelling as I did. One hundred lean pages — that’s about half the size of the Mueller Report, and more interesting. In fact, more crucial to your own understanding of The Swamp.