Book Review - Diana West's The Red Thread

Diana West is a phenomenon.  She must be researching 16 hours a day, seven days a week.  Her outrageous claims are thoroughly footnoted.  She will be charged with being a believer in conspiracies.  As we all know believers in conspiracies are crazy unless they are vast right wing conspiracies.  West traces the roots of the present Deep State to its origins in the Roosevelt administration.  In 1933 the federal government employed about 500,000 people and by 1945 it employed about 3.5 million civilian employees.  Many of the more influential members of this administration were recruited by people like Soviet agent Harry Dexter White.  Many communists were removed from the government in the late 1940s and 1950s.  However, many communists and progressives remained.  I have studied this matter thoroughly but Diana West’s work was a real eye opener.  The Red Thread continues the argument made in West’s American Betrayal: Soviet agents manipulated U.S. policy.  This is Myth No. 5 in Mark Kramer March 2018 Washington Post article: Espionage mostly aims to sway the policies of hostile powers.  Harvey Klehr and John Earl Hayes, respected Soviet researchers, agree with Kramer.  I wrote to Dr. Klehr and asked him to explain his position.  He responded, “The point of our comment was that we have not seen anything in Russian archives indicating that someone like White got told to try to manipulate policy.  I am no expert on the Morgenthau Plan but my guess is that it was White acting on his own.”  So the orthodox view is that the Russian were not interested in influencing U.S. policy except when Donald Trump was running for president.  These “experts” should check the Soviet definition of the term “active measures.”

Again, Diana West is a phenomenon.  She is an exceptionally diligent researcher.  Because of her positions she has been ostracized by the “mainstream” media.  Instead we have Megyn Kelly and Marie Harf.  We can check the internet for their qualifications.  We are informed of Harf’s bra size (36B).  However, there is no mention of her IQ.  I have only one criticism of The Red Tread.  West refers to Dennis Prager’s comment that the news media is a greater threat than Russia as hyperbole.  CNN does not have “hypersonic missiles or neutron bombs.”  I would rather have a force of determined primitives with bows and arrows than a nuclear equipped power that does not have backbone or is not aware that it is involved in a war.