On Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily journalist Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, responded to CNN”s weird attempt to manufacture a scandal out of something former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon said to her four years ago.
“This was yet another attempt by CNN to play ‘gotcha,’” West said. “In this case, it was with a 2013 interview that I did on Breitbart News radio with Steve Bannon. It’s about a 30-plus minute interview about American Betrayal – which, in modern parlance, I like to think of as the map of The Swamp, just to give you a general gist of it.”
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She said CNN listened to this entire discussion, which was “a very historical-based, fact-based, and to me quite fascinating discussion I had with Steve,” who was hosting the Breitbart News radio show at the time.
“In the concluding moments, he gives a passing nod to Joseph McCarthy, correctly stating that Joseph McCarthy was right about so much of what he was looking at,” West recalled. “And they write an entire story about that one line, because in their world of not just Fake News but fake history, this is an outrage that is supposed to then engender wails and shrieks and fainting among their friends in Media Land, and be more reason to find Stephen Bannon a frightening character.”
“I’ve been a journalist literally for 30 years now, and what really bothers me, even to this day – I know I should know better about these things given the situation – but what really bothers me is the absolute lack of any sort of professional curiosity, which really should be the basis of anybody going into journalism, right?” she said. “Curiosity, finding out the facts. In order to set that story up, in order to say ‘Why would Steve Bannon say such a thing? That seems outrageous to us!’, let’s look at the facts. Let’s look at that conversation again, 30 minutes of discussion.”
“No, this was just a gotcha story,” she sighed. “It’s desperate, it’s pathetic, but it also becomes another opportunity to get the truth out, which is why I’m so happy we’re having this conversation.”
“It’s a very, very signal part of our history, especially today as people are so fecklessly throwing around this concept of Russian influence, Russian subversion, in the most ignorant terms. Whereas we have a history, certainly including very much in the forefront of that Joseph McCarthy’s history, and many other investigators, many other defectors, many other historians and journalists and so on,” said West.
She found a sinister political purpose in the demonization campaigns directed at anyone who questions the Left’s historical narrative of the McCarthy years.
“The overall effect of this drumbeat, that has not stopped for – oh, my gosh, we’re talking 60-some years or more – it prevents people from taking that important look. It prevents academics from going back and re-reading the records. It prevents people from having the kinds of conversations we’re having right now. That is the purpose, because once you pull the plug on Joseph McCarthy and understand the extent to which America was subverted, our government and institutions were subverted, and you put it together into our general history, which is what I start to do in American Betrayal – there’s much more to do – it overturns our entire conception of ourselves as a nation, and our own history,” West said.
She applauded Breitbart News for spotlighting a story by the late M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, in which he counted “how many cases that came before McCarthy and his committee had been proven to be indeed assets, agents, ideological Communists inside the federal government.”
“He came up with fifty, and he stopped counting,” West said. “He could have continued, but he stopped at fifty, it’s a nice big number. That’s incredible in such a short career, that was going on in the Senate as McCarthy was being continually investigated himself, one after another investigation. The man was dead at age 48. So we’re looking at an extraordinary person with an extraordinary career. We have not been allowed to reckon with what it means, and what this history means.”
“And then today, when we come across all the Russia news, it’s as if we’re in an alternate universe, because the kinds of charges that are going around, with people being called Russian agents, Russian stooges and so on… Joseph McCarthy would never have made such reckless allegations without evidence,” she said with a laugh.
Marlow referred to Evan’s article to point out that McCarthy had evidence of active Communists rising very high in the federal government, whereas six months of intensive research with vastly more sophisticated Information Age tools has yet to uncover any proof of nefarious Russian influence in the current administration.
“That’s a really important point, in terms of how far up these people were able to rise, and there were so many of them that before World War II was really under way, you had Rep. Martin Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee – a Democrat from Texas – who was able to put together, using the kinds of Communist front groups that had been identified by the Attorney General as subversive groups, he was able to put together a list of 1,124 federal employees who were members of these Communist front groups,” West noted.
“This was an incredible thing in terms of the fact that on that list, which I actually possess a copy of, there are the names of Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, many other of the most important and dangerous Soviet agents who essentially restyled the world after World War II,” she revealed. “Alger Hiss was the first acting Secretary-General of the United Nations. That was really his baby, this idea of world government. Harry Dexter White headed up the International Monetary Fund. The whole global monetary system was formed under this Communist agent. These were the kinds of people who were identified before they had done their worst treachery.”
“And yet, it was squelched. This is why the title was American Betrayal,” she said of her book. “This was a betrayal of America that was coming out of our government. When we see the Deep State ideas today, these two have been prevalent, and these two have been kind of denied to us, because our history does not go into them, does not allow us to go into them.”
West said the mechanism for this denial tends to be McCarthy.
“If you are afraid of being called a McCarthyite, then you tend not to step on that tripwire and look into this incredibly important part of our history and understand it,” she explained. “There is continuity here that we must understand if we are going to be able to destroy it, destroy that Deep State, the Swamp that we hear so much about. It’s not just a privileged bureaucracy. It’s the place where the secrets lie. I think of the creatures in historical terms – the Swamp creatures are the people who want to keep those secrets hidden from us.”
“They belong to us. These are all government enterprises, government secrets. They belong to the American people, particularly now, as we’re looking 50, 60, 70 years down the line,” she contended. “These things should be broken out of those archives and presented to us, so that we can understand who we are, and what has been done to us. A lot of this really is ugly, ugly treachery against the American people.”
West said she thought part of the animus against Donald Trump was due to the possibility that he might dig into these long-buried secrets.
“It is so important that we get this information out of the darkness and into the light. That’s where you go back to the importance of not allowing yourself to be stopped by this concept of McCarthyism,” she urged.
Marlow noted that public revulsion for “witch hunts” has grown far out of proportion to any careful historical analysis of how much Joseph McCarthy got right or wrong. Witch hunting has become a buzzword that will likely be deployed to thwart any serious investigation of the Deep State, which West described as an “existential threat to the Trump administration.”
She said the Deep State has “a lot to do with what law professor Jonathan Turley has spoken of as an existential threat to the Constitution, in terms of being the ‘fourth branch of government.’”
West went further and drew a comparison between America’s “unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy” and the “old Soviet-style nomenklatura,” who were essential to imposing the will of the socialist state.
“I actually went back to one of my old Soviet history books this week on nomenklatura,” she said. “Low and behold, it was something that was denied in terms of official Soviet government documents or admissions. It was something that was hidden, and people who talked about it were essentially looked at and tried to be marginalized, because this was not something that really existed. Well of course it did, and we’re looking at the same thing here. We’re supposed to not talk about it, and not believe that it exists, but of course it does.”
“In terms of its power, I can’t even begin to overestimate the importance of opening up these kinds of archival secrets, because I think they are the source of the power today of the Deep State, of the manipulation of not just news, but as we were talking earlier, of history,” she said. “Fake history becomes a way of powering that bureaucracy to continue doing what it’s doing. Once you pull out the underpinnings, and once you actually expose what’s going on, I think their foundations get knocked out from under them,” she anticipated.
“It really is incumbent on President Trump to consider this idea of an American Truth Commission that would be designed to bring these papers into the public eye,” West urged. “I’m talking about, for example, 60-year-old FBI documents that have been ‘declassified’ but the redactions, or censoring black lines, are so heavy that you can’t read them. They’re basically unreadable.”
She referenced demands for access to other, more recent documents, including U.S. intelligence about Russian bombings in Chechnya, which helped propel Russian President Vladimir Putin into power.
“Many people have accused him of complicity in those bombings,” West noted. “What does our government know about that? These are the kinds of things that we should know, so that we can make as people sovereign, reasonable, fact-based decisions about the direction of our country. These secrets should not be the purview of unelected, hidden bureaucracies – and this would be, in the case of the CIA, the ultimate in that category.”
She stressed the importance of uncovering these bureaucratic secrets without compromising U.S. intelligence-gathering methods or national security.
“I’m not talking about anything irresponsible, but just simply what we know inside, and what was known long ago inside. That should definitely come out unredacted,” she said of her proposed American Truth Committee.
“These are the kinds of things that give power to the elites, to the establishment, that are absolutely at war with Donald Trump. He’s the only outsider I think we can hope that we will ever have. I don’t think that we’ll ever see his like again, in terms of his outsider status. Only an outsider could do this. Only an outsider could call for this with presidential powers. It’s a golden opportunity that we have, and I hope he considers this,” said West.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
Listen to the full audio of West’s interview above.
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