RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dr-crankleys-not-so-great-grandchildren-diana-west-analyzes-why-the-anti-trump-putschists-persist/

A review-essay of the new monograph The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West.
“Running like a red thread through Communist teachings from the very inception of the movement is the note of total hostility to our form of government.”– from The Communist Party Of The United States Of America: What It Is. How It Works. A Handbook For Americans,” at a hearing by the Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, December 21, 1955, P. 16. Strident never-Trumper Max Boot, quoted in a 3/2/2016 NY Times article, infamously encapsulated his unhinged vacuity on the subject of then-leading GOP Presidential contender Donald Trump by belching forth: “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.”

Forgive the gentle, attentive reader of Diana West’s uniquely insightful, painstakingly researched new monograph, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, for pausing to re-consider whether Boot’s sneering utterance was pure hyperbole.Whittaker Chambers, apostate from the Communist religion of immoralism, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto with a thoughtfully acid February 23, 1948 Time essay on Karl Marx and his legacy entitled “Dr. Crankley’s Children.”

The essay’s title derived from a pseudonym, “Dr. Crankley,” Marx adopted in a March 3, 1865 letter to his daughter. Chambers recounted Marx’s triumphal hypocrisy, producing a publication that declared itself an “organ of democracy” while admitting the “reality” that it “was nothing but a plan against democracy.” This behavior segued to “the first Party purges,” conducted by a man who despised “sentimental socialism” and was described by a contemporary thusly: “Baring his teeth, Marx will slaughter anybody who blocks his way.”

The inevitable progression of such dogma, and behaviors, observes Chambers, was Marx’s conclusion that he must “capture” the state with police power and establish his dystopian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” “Written down,” Chambers averred, “it was to become an extension of his own tyrannical political methods, the excuse for the most pitiless tyranny the world has ever seen.” Assessing what Marx bestowed through his ideological progeny, Chambers characterized three classes of Dr. Crankley’s children. Those Chambers dubbed the “children of pity,” epitomized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, concurred with Marx’s indictment of capitalism, but believed in an inexorable “steady bicycle ride toward socialism.” Benito Mussolini was Chambers’ archetype for the “children of hate,” who “put the machines and classes to work for war.”The third class of Dr. Crankley’s children “inherited the cold disciplined logic necessary for the serious pursuit of power.” Embodied by Lenin, who, “like Father Marx, knew what was best,” they were (and remain) the “most important and the most terrible of the Marxist brood.” Lenin, Chambers reminds us, “snatched away” democracy, “organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., a disciplined gang of power monopolists,” and his acolytes “smashed men freely.”With meticulously researched detail, and fearless, extraordinary originality of thought, Diana West’s remarkably compendious The Red Thread introduces us to key (not-so-) great-grandchildren of Dr. Crankley. Their continuing machinations amount to nothing less than an anti-Trump putsch.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-fights-deep-state-swamp-fights-back/

Never before in the history of the presidency had a commander-in-chief earned the antipathy of so many — and lived to tell the tale.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump. It appears here with permission.

T rump was warned by friends, enemies, and neutrals that his fight against the deep state was suicidal. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, cheerfully forecast (in a precursor to Samantha Power’s later admonition) what might happen to Trump once he attacked the intelligence services: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Former administrative-state careerists were not shy about warning Trump of what was ahead. The counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, who had worked in the CIA and the FBI under Robert Mueller, warned CNN host Jake Tapper in August 2017 that “the government is going to kill” President Donald Trump. Kill? And what was the reason the melodramatic Mudd adduced for his astounding prediction? “Because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd then elaborated: “Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. The government is going to kill this guy. The government is going to kill this guy because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd further clarified his assassination metaphor: “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really?’”

It was difficult to ascertain to what degree Mudd was serious or exaggerating the depth of deep-state loathing of Trump.

A writer for the London Review of Books, Adam Schatz, seemed even more direct. He reported a supposed conversation that he had with an American political scientist knowledgeable of the Washington permanent caste. He purportedly had assured Schatz that if Trump were elected, he would likely not survive his full term: “He will have to be removed from power by the deep state, or be assassinated.”

The first investigation into why a ring of senior Washington officials went rogue to derail the election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There was nothing normal about the 2016 presidential election, not when senior U.S. officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government — designed to stop terrorist attacks — against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic.

The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from “politics as usual” to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election?

Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more.

Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America’s first “America First” and most anti-Communist president.

If we just give it a pull, the “red thread” is very long and very deep.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/anonymous-editorial-resistance-trump-administration/

Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump.
The premise of efforts to undermine Trump is that the establishment has such power, prestige, and authority to overturn the verdict of the 2016 election.

On September 5, 2018, the New York Times published an anonymous editorial by a supposed “senior official” in the Trump administration. In astounding fashion, the unnamed writer claimed that he/she was part of a legion of administration appointees and government officials who were actively working to undermine the Trump presidency by overriding his orders, keeping information from an unknowing Trump, or acting independently of his directives. Or as Anonymous unapologetically put it:

Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

The Times author then continues by confessing to a sort of slow-motion coup to undermine the Trump presidency:

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.

The result is a two-track presidency.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/trumping-right-along

EXCERPTS: “Democrats across the board, along with many “never Trump” conservatives, still do not accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election, and they have worked incessantly for the past two years to nullify the verdict of the voters for daring to elect him in the first place. Some left-wing critics, including a few Hollywood celebrities, have openly hoped for the assassination of the President or for violence against his supporters and family members, while at the same time attacking him for violating established political norms. Well-known authors have turned out one book after another purporting to show that the President’s administration is in chaos, that he is unfit to hold office, or that he has committed crimes deserving impeachment. Those lonely Trump voters—some sixty-three million of them scattered across the land—have so far waited in vain for a prominent writer to step forward to make the case for the candidate they elected in the hope that he might stem the loss of their jobs, the collapse of their communities, and the overall decline of their country.Their wait is now over, thanks to Victor Davis Hanson’s The Case for Trump, an insightful, informative, and much-needed account of Donald Trump the upstart candidate and precedent-shattering president.1 Hanson, the author of many books on the history of ancient Greece and Rome and the history of warfare, including a comprehensive history of World War II published last year, writes in defense of President Trump with a degree of depth and sophistication that readers will not find in the carelessly written and unsourced broadsides attacking the President.

“After two years in office, Trump’s vocal critics are having a difficult time denying his many achievements, including a bustling economy, foreign policy successes, judicial appointments, regulatory reforms, energy independence, and a strong effort to curb illegal immigration, to name the most obvious ones. Will he succeed in rekindling the fortunes of the American worker, taming the establishment, and re-balancing U.S. national interests against international pressures? It is still too soon to tell. But, as Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates in this fascinating analysis of the past three years, no matter how things turn out this year and next, President Trump has made a good start in addressing issues in America that have for too long been ignored by both political parties.

https://www.city-journal.org/vs-and-shiva-naipaul

In the 1970s, when the ideas of Third Worldism had reached their apex, I became enamored of the work of two gifted writers: V. S. Naipaul and his brother, Shiva Naipaul. V. S., who died last year at 85, won the 2000 Nobel Prize for literature; his comparably talented brother, Shiva, 13 years younger, died at 40 from a sudden heart attack in 1985. Both were born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and went on to study at Oxford and then make lives for themselves in England. They were the grandchildren of Hindu indentured servants brought from India to replace the slaves who had once worked the colony’s sugar plantations. Their father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist and an aspiring novelist.

Intellectually and emotionally, the Naipaul brothers were caught up in the experience of the Indian diaspora in Africa and South America as a direct result of the circumstances of their birth, which gave them a different perspective on the so-called Third World from what was conventionally offered by Western devotees of dictators in Castro’s Cuba, Forbes Burnham’s Guyana, Ben Bella’s Algeria, or Nasser’s Egypt. American and European leftists looked to those charismatic leaders as charting an alternative path to independent development, apart from the West or the Soviet Union. Their thinking, unlike that of the Naipauls, did not hold up well.