Review: Nick Bryant: The Franklin Scandal, A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal (2009)

 Nick Bryant's The Franklin Scandal is, among other things, an investigative tour de force. Bryant tracked down and interviewed many of the victims. He crossed referenced his interviews along with many previous ones in order to determine the witnesses' veracity. He also provides 100 pages of documentary evidence, including rare primary sources, in the book's appendix. He painstaking concern with detail is necessary given the massive cover-up of the crimes he documents. 

 

The Franklin Scandal is named after Omaha, Nebraska's Franklin Community Federal Credit Union. It was managed by Lawrence (Larry) King (no relation to the cable news guy). Franklin Community was closed by the feds in November 1988 as part of the savings and loan debacle. King would go to prison for looting over $40 million from its depositors and creditors. King was a prominent member of the Republican Party and sang the National Anthem at its 1984 convention. From his Georgetown townhouse, he lavishly entertained Republican big shots. 

Franklin was also a front for a national pedophile ring. As the Nebraska state legislature dug into Franklin's sordid operations, the witnesses multiplied. The state hired private investigator Gary Caradori to ferret out the facts and get the witnesses on record. Caradori tracked down King's photographer. As with Jeffrey Epstein, King's perversions augmented his career as blackmailer of the rich and powerful. 

As Bryant documents, it is clear that Caradori had acquired either photographs or video of the crimes. Before Caradori could deliver the evidence his Piper Saratoga broke apart and fell out of the sky. Both Caradori and his son were killed. Both the FAA and the NTSB showed a complete lack of curiosity on why the aircraft just broke up during flight. His briefcase was not recovered from the wreckage.

The next step of the cover-up involved the FBI coercing victims to recant the video taped testimony they had given to Caradori. In typical FBI fashion, they attempted to frame Caradori as a shake-down artist seeking to cash in on the scandal. However, they had not reckoned with Alisha Owen. She refused to recant her statement. Bryant devotes much space on how the FBI, Nebraska State Police and the Omaha Police Department pressured her. By the way, the Omaha chief of police was one of her rapists. 

The state charged Owen with perjury. Her younger brother Aaron was picked up for joyriding. He had the book thrown at him. Then, he was found hanging in his cell. His death was determined a suicide. Of course, it was. Bryant further documents how Owen's first attorney committed a host of offenses that including colluding with the FBI and breaking privilege. None of this mattered, the kangaroo court found her guilty. Bryant meticulously reviews the court transcripts illustrating this obscene miscarriage of justice. 

The state of Nebraska was desperate to substantiate the narrative that it was all just a "carefully crafted hoax." Too many influential people and institutions were involved. For example, Boys Town located just outside Omaha. Bryant tracked down several alumni of Boys Town. They stated that it was used as a hunting ground by the pedo gang. They would recruit boys from Boys Town and then pimp them out for sex parties held for well-heeled garbage. In 1990, few believed such charges brought against a venerable institution. Today, the accusation that the Catholic Church was/is covering up a pedophile ring at Boys Town is not so far-fetched.  

It was the FBI that took point on covering up their political masters' mess. Because, this scandal reached directly into the White House. Remember Larry King's Georgetown townhouse? His pedo ring operated in Washington D.C. He was linked to Craig Spence. Craig Spence ran his own pedo/blackmail ring in D.C. He was conveniently found suicided on 10 November 1989. According to the NY Times, so we know it's true, "Mr. Spence arranged at least four midnight tours of the White House, including one on June 29, 1988, on which he took with him a 15-year-old boy whom he falsely identified as his son." 

We are to believe that a single security guard allowed Spence into the White House for a small bribe. The White House has at least three controlled entry points before anyone can actually enter the building. Every one of those doors/gates are on camera, which are monitored 24/7. The grounds are patrolled by guards who have automatic weapons and attack dogs. The Secret Service has its patrols inside. Cameras are everywhere. But, this Spence character and his sex slave just wandered around the White House in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. Well, that's their story and they're still sticking to it. The Bush administration was ruthless and desperate to cover this up. You do the math. 

In 1993, British television produced a documentary that was scheduled for airing on the Discovery Channel. It was killed and never aired. Here is the "rough draft" without final editing.

Needless to say, the Franklin Scandal is not an isolated incident. Far from it. Clearly, the Craig Spence and Larry King pedo/blackmail rings were just early precursors to the much more notorious Epstein ring. Note how since Epstein's death, the authorities have shown no interest in pursuing the case. Ghislaine Maxwell will cut a deal and keep her mouth shut, just like Larry King. Rest assured that there will be no other indictments resulting from this latest elite pedo crime spree. 

Nick Bryant states that he was investigating the bizarre Finders Cult, which led him to Franklin. The Finders was a murky cult that was involved in child trafficking in the 1980s. Only recently has the FBI deigned to release information on it. The US Customs Service was involved because of its expertise in human trafficking at the time. Its full report is available here in PDF. The conclusion makes for interesting reading. This is an official US Customs Service report:

"The individual further advised me of circumstances which
indicated that the investigation into the activity of the FINDER
had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD report has been.
classified secret and as not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counter Intelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired.        
No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.
ACTION TO BE TAKEN BY LESD/TECS :
No action to be taken on the basis of this report."

This is a deep rabbit hole. Apparently, the Customs Service stumbled upon the CIA's Operation Midnight Climax (seriously) which was/is part of MK Ultra. The CIA operated brothels in the USA for blackmail purposes and to further research into mind control. The CIA stated during the Church Committee that they're not doing that anymore. So, there's nothing to worry about. From Wikipedia: 

"The project that started in 1954 consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin County, California and New York City. It was established in order to study the effects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass."

As with the above mentioned cases, it should go without saying that the legal "system" will take no official notice of Hunter Biden's antics. These are the same people who claim that Pizzagate is nothing but a conspiracy theory. Pay no attention to the Podesta brothers sick "art" and extensive use of pedophile argot. 

The examples are almost endless: from the Clintons' Haitian connections; to Hollywood's long standing agenda to normalize child porn from Pretty Baby (1978) to Cuties. There's the anti-Trump Lincoln Project revelations. There's Mark Foley, Dennis Hastert, Jimmy Savile, Anthony Weiner, Rotherham, Penn State. 

There's the truly horrifying case of the Circle S Ranch. From 1953 to 1978 the states of California and Arizona turned over "troubled boys" to the perverts and sadists Leo and Ella Stein. When a boy who ran away was found dead in the desert, nothing happened. Saying this case has been Memory Holed is an understatement. Little about it can be found on the internet. In 1980, NBC aired a documentary on the Circle S Ranch. Part of it has been uploaded onto You Tube. And, that's about it. 

 

When anyone says that the Franklin Scandal is just a "conspiracy theory," remind them that there are a lot of dots to connect. The West's ruling elite seem to have little problem with pedophilia or human trafficking. More evidence can be found on the American southern border.

Review: Charles Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring, 1952. Preface by Douglas MacArthur

Major General Charles S. Willoughby served as Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence (G2) from 1941 to 1951. With the American occupation of Japan in 1945, American military intelligence acquired the Japanese police records that dealt with subversive elements. Ferreting out Communist spies and sympathizers was a high priority for the Japanese political police. Richard Sorge was a German Communist and Stalin's man in Tokyo. He was caught in October 1941 and executed in 1944.

The first section of this book documents the recruitment, organization and activities of the Sorge spy ring in Tokyo and Shanghai. The second section is Sorge's own account of his activities that is over one-hundred pages long. It was written while he was incarcerated by the Japanese. From 1930 to 1932, Sorge ran a spy ring in Shanghai for Moscow. Sorge report includes this interesting bit on recruiting agents: 

At first I selected people from among [Agnes] Smedley's friends, approaching them by asking Smedley to introduce me to them and then waiting until I could negotiate with them directly.... I am sure that  before I met him I asked Smedley repeatedly to introduce a suitable Japanese to me. There is no doubt that Smedley conferred with her Chinese acquaintances concerning my request and that it was relayed to suitable Chinese and Japanese in Shanghai. 

Agnes Smedley was a Communist traitor to betrayed America to not one, not two but to three foreign nations. This brings us to the book's third section: Agnes Smedley and the War Department. Smedley was born in Missouri in 1892. Her strongest motivation was a burning hatred of her native land and its people. During the First World War she was an agent of subversion for Imperial Germany (really). After the war, she moved on to being a lifetime servant of Joe Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. 

General Willoughby sent Washington a full, documented report on Sorge's spying in both China and Japan in 1948. Included in this report were documents obtained from the Shanghai Municipal Police on Sorge's espionage there. This report included detailed information on Smedley's spying in Shanghai as a member of the Sorge ring. The American media got wind of this report and was clamoring for the release of such a juicy story. The War Department was happy to oblige with at least a partial release of the report. Then, the War Department reversed its decision and refused to go public with the document. 

It is difficult, if not impossible, to get the full story on this strange episode from the early Cold War. Smedley was prominently mentioned in the report and her activities made it into the press. But, she must have had friends in high places. The Army pulled the report and the media vociferously defended her. She even threatened to sue both MacArthur and Willoughby. Willoughby told her to go ahead. He had the documents and Sorge's own testimony. Willoughby providing damning evidence of Smedley's treason in his book. One of Smedley's many supporters was Harold Ickes. Ickes was President Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior for thirteen years. A lifetime leftist and power grabber, he came into conflict with MacArthur during World War II over Philippines' policy. After the war, he became a newspaper commentator. As Willoughby explained in his previous book MacArthur: 1941-1951: 

This smoldering, implacable enmity burst into open flame in 1949, when Tokyo intelligence reports disclosed the leftist writer Agnes Smedley as an accomplice of Richard Sorge, Soviet master-spy in the Far East. Ickes at once sponsored Smedley in his vituperative newspaper column. While his diatribe was directed against intelligence, MacArthur was the real target. Ickes protegee died in 1950 and left her belongings to Chu-Teh, the Commander in Chief of the Red hordes at war with America. Her ashes were placed in a state shrine in Peking. [p. 270]

Even Smedley's comrades at Wikipedia admit that her "ashes were buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing in 1951."

There are several reasons why this long forgotten episode of the Cold War is important. For instance, it illustrates how the Communists were able to take over China. Mao's best and most important allies were in Washington and New York. The ChiComs had/has numerous press agents and agents of influence in the United States. Some may actually have been ignorant dupes - but, it's difficult to believe that anyone is that stupid. The pattern would repeat in Cuba, Southeast Asia, Central America, Venezuela, etc., etc. 

The Smedley episode demonstrates the standard "liberal" tactic of denying that Communists and traitors are who they are, while attacking genuine whistle blowers as "red baiting" "witch hunters." Only long after the fact will the "liberals" admit the truth. Only when it is too late for justice or even damage control will the media acknowledge historical reality. 

                                                  A Commie? Don't be a "Red Baiter"

To this day, Charles Willoughby is smeared as an incompetent buffoon by the "experts." Meanwhile, Hollywood's flagship flacks at Variety extol Smedley the Communist traitor/spy as some sort of feminist icon. Of course, Willoughby's book has been out of print for nearly seventy years and is long forgotten. Funny how that works. This is how the media, academia and the "experts" rewrite history to fit their ongoing and never changing agenda.   

Addendum: Here's a quote from General George C. Kenney's introduction to Robert L. Scott's biography Flying Tiger: Chennault of China: 

Among other things, Chennault's insistence that the Chinese Communists were a threat, as well as the Japanese, had brought him into conflict with his army superiors in the theater and in Washington. Chennault had lived with the Chinese, he had fought side by side with them, he had enjoyed their confidence; and, shrewd analyst that he was, it is reasonable to suppose that he knew the situation in China, but his advice was ignored. To him, Mao Tse-tung and his gang were Reds, closely allied with Moscow, not the harmless "agrarians" that some of out starry-eyed "experts" called them. To him, they were no more to be trusted than events have since proved them to be. If we had gone along with his recommendations it is quite conceivable that China today would be the traditional friend of the United States that she used to be, rather than a tool of the Kremlin, dedicated to the conquest of the world and the enforcement of the dictates of communism by the slave-labor camp and the firing squad. 

Time Out

I'm taking a break from blogging for a little while. I will be back. I wish I could be as confident about our already diminished liberty. 

A few months ago, we were hectored to destroy the entire global economy because some obnoxious, autistic teenager was triggered. Now that goal has been achieved. It's no coincident. It's enemy action.

Someone finally realized that the state can seize dictatorial power by invoking public health. Those laws have been ticking bombs for many decades.  

 

Ayn Rand and Pittsburgh; Official Objectivism and Munich

Scott Holleran has a piece about Ayn Rand in the latest issue of the Pittsburgh Quarterly. He begins by making a connection between Ayn Rand and the city. It's a tenuous one. He notes that Rand wrote positively about Pittsburgh while passing through in 1947. She was taking a cross country trip by train as research for Atlas Shrugged. Investigating steel mills was an important part of that research. One of the few positive reviews of The Fountainhead was by Pittsburgh Press critic Bett Anderson. 

Holleran continues by noting that the University of Pittsburgh Press is publishing a series of works on Ayn Rand's philosophy. Unfortunately, these books are written by academic philosophers for academic philosophers. Therefore, it's doubtful they will have any impact on American culture. Such unread, and largely unreadable, books fly off university presses. They will sit unread in university libraries until the end of days. 

This academic book project brings us to the main theme of Holleran's article. It is yet another effort by those affiliated or in agreement with the Ayn Rand Institute to appease, pander and suck up to the left, including the academic left. 

 Let's begin with Holleran's description of Ayn Rand: 

A Jewish atheist who escaped from Russia to the U.S. in 1926, Rand became, by the time of her death in 1982, America’s foremost woman thinker." (emphasis added) 

The above is a classic example of definition by non-essentials. Ayn Rand never, ever described herself as Jewish. She had no interest in the Jewish religion. There is no evidence that she had any interest in Jewish culture. Of course, Ayn Rand was an atheist. But, she never defined herself with that negative concept. She defined herself in positive terms. In her famous short introduction to Objectivism, or Objectivism while standing on one foot, the word "atheism" is not found.  

Why describe Ayn Rand in such a way? After all, George Soros, Saul Alinsky and Karl Marx are also "Jewish atheists." Probably for that very reason. It's calculated to appeal to leftists who will assume that a "Jewish atheist" is far left of center or at least sympathetic with their cultural Marxist nihilism. The evidence is the careful massaging of her message by Anthem Foundation Fellow Gregory Salmieri. 

Ayn Rand described herself as a "radical for capitalism" who fights for the "supremacy of reason." This will not do for Holleran or Salmieri. Instead, they appease and evade. They water down Rand's ideas to make them palatable for leftists. For example, this doozy: 

“We’re at the point in history of Rand’s passing from being a controversial contemporary figure in the history of thought,” said Salmieri. “It’s time for reference works.” 

Rand "controversial!" Hush your mouth! Objectivism isn't "controversial."

“I think that readers who associate her with conservatives or libertarians might not know that she viewed government as good and necessary. Her thoughts on freedom of speech and intellectual freedom relate to the views of John Locke and the founding views of America. She held that there are principles governing how societies operate — that there’s a real need for a government and that government [should] stick to certain proper functions and fully perform those functions. I think the structure of her view is not well understood by people who just think of her as a kind of propagandist against Big Government.”

Her views on individual rights (missing from the above) are extremely "controversial" to the left. Only evaders refuse to see that the academic left avidly seeks to destroy what's left of Lockean liberalism in America. Their hostility to free speech doesn't require any further evidence. The "founding views of America" are what the left most hates - along with the Founders who created the country. 

He continues,

Salmieri said the notion of Rand as an exclusively right-​wing thinker stems from the left/​right dichotomy that dominates American politics. 

“This was particularly [prevalent] during the forties through the early seventies — when Rand was writing — and the issue that most obviously separated them was the growth of the welfare state.” Because Rand was critical of communism and socialism, Salmieri said, she was strongly opposed by the left. (emphasis added)

No. What separated Rand from the left was their rejection of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights and political freedom. Ayn Rand excoriated the left on such cultural issues as environmentalism, women's lib, modern art, affirmative action, and above all, its egalitarianism. Needless to say, these remain core anti-values for the left. 

Salmieri has claimed elsewhere that the right/left political divide is largely meaningless because both are of mixed premises. The motivation is to create the impression that both are equally irrational, altruistic and dangerous to freedom. Such nonsense is contrary to observable reality. Earlier this week "rightists" who support gun rights peacefully demonstrated in Richmond, Virginia despite the leftist government's threats. Meanwhile, the left engages in vicious and violent suppression of free speech at every opportunity. Antifa riots and mayhem are their specialty. "Rightist" speakers on college campuses require armed guards. The inability to distinguish between the relative merits and demerits of the right and left is itself a form of evasion. It's the refusal to differentiate between Edmund Burke and Robespierre or between Joe McCarthy and Joe Stalin. 

Ayn Rand was not "critical" of communism and socialism. She properly defined each as evil that leads to mass death and makes human life impossible. Her first novel We the Living was publish in 1936. It is set in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. In it she dramatizes how communism must destroy the best for the worse. There are countless examples in Rand's non-fiction writing to demonstrate that she wasn't "critical" of communism and socialism. She trenchantly proved that there is little difference between the two and that both are irredeemable evil. This is why the left hates her and smears her at every opportunity. 

The left, including academia, is now absolutely dominated by their hatred of the good for being the good. This nihilism permeates their entire political and social agenda. Ayn Rand wrote "The Age of Envy" in 1971. It is a tour de force that lays bare the naked evil of the left. She identifies its pathology that has metastasized in our day into a society wrecking cancer. Only an extended quote can do it justice and make my point:

Altruists are no longer concerned with material wealth, not even with its "redistribution," only with its destruction - but even this is merely a means to an end. Their savage fury is aimed at the destruction of intelligence - of ability, ambition thought, purpose, justice; the destruction of morality, any sort of morality; the destruction of values qua values. 
The last fig leaf of academic pretentiousness is the tag used to disguise this movement: egalitarianism. It does not disguise, but reveals
Today's advocates of "equality" do not pretend that they wish to improve the lot of the poor; they do not wish to exploit the competent, but to destroy them.
If anyone doubted the possibility of such motives, the ecological crusade should remove all doubts.
But, the hippies were not enough. They were surpassed by the caricature to end all caricatures: Women's Lib.

This is what Salmieri refers to as "critical," as if Ayn Rand was some academic of "critical studies" who ignored fundamentals and "criticized" based on non-essentials. He continues by describing Rand's political views thus,

Salmieri cited Rand’s desire to preserve freedom of speech, secularism, abortion rights, end of life decision rights and equal protection of minorities. (emphasis added)

Salmieri has spent his entire career in academia and has adopted its Newspeak of evasion. Note the absence of the concept of individual rights in his examples. When academic leftists speak of "equal protection of minorities" they mean equality of results between racial/ethnic groups. Everyone knows this. Salmieri isn't stupid, he fully understands the implication of this phrase to his left-wing audience. It's the reductio ad absurdum of the left's collectivism and egalitarianism. Furthermore, protection from whom? White racists, of course. Part of the left's pathology is their belief in "white privilege" that causes different achievement rates between groups. And, like a "good" academic, Salmieri concurs that "white privilege" exists and is a problem. The race obsessed academic left's hatred for white people is yet another issue that Salmieri shamelessly evades.

As for state sanctioned and enforced homicide, known as euthanasia, I would like to see the reference in Rand's work supporting it.

The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has a long history of rewriting Objectivism in order to make it more attractive to the academic left. In part, this is because most of ARI's principles are more comfortable socially with political leftists. In part, because many of ARI's leaders are from the political left. They just don't like or understand the "Deplorables" who elected Donald Trump. 

Another obvious reason for ARI's leftist lurch is the necessity of not offending its founder and patron Leonard Peikoff. In 2012, Peikoff published The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West are Going Out.  Based on his thesis, Peikoff makes the following prediction for America: 

Not just a religious totalitarianism, but a religious-fascist totalitarianism - that is my prediction of the American future.

Peikoff really believes that Jerry Falwell, or his equivalent, is poised to takeover the USA. Meanwhile, the left continues to gut Western Civilization with the enthusiastic help of their Mohammedan allies. 

It seems to be a major job description for ARI intellectuals to rationalize Peikoff's absurd prediction. Hence, they attack Donald Trump as the second coming of Hitler. Hence, they always punch right while seeking the left's sanction. Hence, they ignore the existential threat posed by mass invasion from savage cultures. Official Objectivists consider American "right-wing" Christians as the main enemy. Official Objectivists judged academic Marxists as potential allies. In reality, they are the destroyers of everything as Ayn Rand well understood.

Review: Diana West, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character, 2013

In the dark, musty corners of leftist dementia, there are still those who believe Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were innocent of treason and espionage. However, most informed Americans are aware of the Soviet infiltration into the US government in the 1930s and 1940s. What most Americans are not aware of is the massive scale of the Communist fifth-column in government and private organizations. The nature, purpose and consequences of the Soviet intelligence operations are largely unknown. What is too often ignored by historians and scholars is the long lasting damage done to the country by the Soviet agents, their moles, fellow travelers and opportunistic enablers. 

Diana West's American Betrayal is the best work available exploring the massive treason that occurred during the Roosevelt administration. She begins at the end of the story by demonstrating how the American people are still betrayed on a daily basis by their leaders. Both the American people and their political leaders have been conditioned to tell and believe an endless series of Big Lies. Such Big Lies as "Climate Change," "diversity is our strength" and Jeffrey Epstein's "suicide" are still daily currency. Although, the liars are fooling less and less people with each passing day. 

West's opening chapter addresses one of the biggest lies of our time: the whitewashing of the Mohammedan Death Cult. After 9/11, George W. Bush famously commented repeatedly on some non-existent "religion of peace." Meanwhile, in classic Bush Crime Family tradition, he dedicated American policy to the best interests of the Saudi Entity. Obama was even worse. He purged both the FBI and military of any truth tellers about Islam who remained in government service. He covered up the motives of the Fort Hood jihadist. 

As enemies of the West, godless Communism and godcentric Islam are strangely, eerily similar, in their collectivist, totalitarian natures, in their dysfunctional ideological reliance on the Eternal Foe for forward thrust, and, above all, in our blindness to all related and resulting implications of our struggle against them. (Pg. 21, emphasis in original)

Of course, Zero (Obama) is the personification of both these anti-life ideologies.

Such [Western] ennui, if that's the right term, is no match for the persistent animus toward capitalism, individualism, and "bourgeois" culture that, again, seemingly paradoxically, has long outlasted the rotted Soviet superstructure. Indeed, in the person of President Barack Hussein Obama, two decades after the disintegration of the USSR, such animus pulses through his administration. (Pg. 24)

In order to explain where our blindness originated, West then moves on to the first Bush administration. She documents Bush's incessant appeasement of and abject surrender to Mikhail Gorbachev. Bush's calumny climaxed with his notorious Chicken Kiev speech in which he attacked the legitimate national yearnings of the Ukrainian people. It appeared that keeping the Soviet Union in business and its empire intact was as important to Bush as it was for Gorby. 

The elder Bush's obsequious position viz a viz Gorbachev is important to West because the issue leads to an important question: who actually won the Cold War? Sure, the Soviet Union is gone. But, their fifth-column flourishes* to this day. In other words, we won over there but lost the much more important philosophical war at home. 

Here, since even before the earliest days of the twentieth century, the riddling, boring penetration of Marxian beliefs - through the influx of true believers from Europe and Russia, through the conversion to true belief of new Marxists at home, and through campaigns of Soviet disinformation and other "active measures" - advanced mainly unchecked. The ideological war abroad ... was lost on all fronts in the battlespace at home: in the academy, in the media, in the popular culture, in the arts, and in the zeitgeist up and down Main Street and even, or perhaps especially, along capitalism's main thoroughfare, Wall Street. It was as if we opposed an enemy Over There without noticing the great chunks of his ideology had taken root, flourished, and borne collectivist and thus anti-American fruit Over Here. (Pg. 35)

The above quote is the core of West's thesis. 

One of West's key pieces of evidence was the rapid moral degeneration of the West after 1932. That year is important because it marks the first, and one of the most egregious, Big Lies propagated to the American people by journalists and politicians who had sold their souls for a pat on the head from Joseph Stalin. I'm referring to their cover up of the Holodomor. Walter Duranty is the most famous of the Big Liars. His reports in the New York Times denying the Ukrainian Terror Famine are well-known. 

He had a lot of help in this exercise in Genocide denial. One important source West uses is Eugene Lyons' "Assignment in Utopia."  Lyons was a UP correspondent in Moscow who achieved a remarkable "scoop" by scoring a rare interview with Stalin. In his book he describes how the entire Moscow press corps covered up the Ukrainian Terror Famine. West's book is chock full of such obscure sources by reformed fellow travelers and anti-Communists. It's no accident that most of these sources are long out of print. The effectiveness of the cultural Marxist campaign of Big Lies can be demonstrated by just mentioning Senator Joe McCarthy at most any gathering:

In the late 1940's, another newly coined term was shot into our cultural arteries: "McCartyism." Again, it was a derogatory term, suggesting some insidious evil, and without any clear definition. Its alleged meaning was: "Unjust accustaions, persecutions, and character assassinations of innocent victims." Its real meaning was: "Anti-Communism."
Senator McCarthy was never proved guilty of those allegations, but the effect of that term was to intimidate and silence public discussions. Any uncompromising denunciation of communism or communists was - and still is - smeared as "McCarthyism." As a consequence, opposition to and exposes of communist penetration have all but vanished from our intellectual scene. (Ayn Rand, "'Extremism,' or the Art of Smearing," The Objectivist Newsletter, September 1964)  

For the United States the moral decay began in November 1933 with Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union. The moral decline, treason and complicity in naked evil accelerated at that point. In his magnum opus, Herbert Hoover noted that the Wilson, Harding, Coolidge and his own administrations refused to take such a step. As he observed, 

The recognition of Russia by the United States gave the Soviet government a stamp of respectability before all the world. Other nations followed our lead, thus opening their gates to conspiracies which plague them to this day. (Herbert Hoover, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, 2011, pg. 29) 

And, as West observed, the Lies continued to multiply, grow and take over. Like weeds on a vacant lot, the Lies drove out the truth and made any American First policy impossible. At first it was necessary to evade the nature of the Soviet Union and "blank out" the existent of its agents operating within the Roosevelt administration. 

Next it became necessary to cover up Soviet crimes. For example, the murder of defector Walter Krivitsky. He had joined the Cheka in 1917. By 1937, he was an NKVD general in charge of all "illegal" operations in Western Europe. Thinking that his number was up at the height of Stalin's purges and show trials, he defected in 1937.  The Roosevelt administration was uninterested in what he had to say. He was refused a green card and protection. A few weeks before he was scheduled to testify before Congress, Krivitsky committed "suicide" on 10 February 1941 in Washington D.C. The FBI was not called in and the story was buried. Eminent historians Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald tell the whole sordid story in their top shelf book On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of World War II. 

West doesn't spend much time on the Krivitsky case. She does provide much detail and documentation on yet another Big Lie prepatrated by the US government: The Katya Forest Massacre in 1941. The story is well known. The evidence that the Soviets had committed this mass murder of Polish Army officers was overwhelming long before the war was over. But, you guessed it, the "see no Communist evil" policy remained firmly in place. 

It did, however, make it more intensively redolent of spoiled fish and, worse, made the Allies complicit for the first time in doing our concerted part to preserve and elaborate on a new Big Lie - this one, to some transformational extent, of our own official making ... Such patterns of censorship and, worse, self-censorship do things to people; do things to our vision and grasp of the truth, our respect for facts, our reliance on judgment. (Pp. 208, 217)

Today, much too late, even the CIA admits to the government cover up (or as they delicately put it "controversy) of the Katyn mass murder for the benefit of our Soviet "ally." 

The US government's degradation, and treason to common decency, gets even worse. West recounts in painful detail Operation Keelhaul that occurred at the war's conclusion. Keelhaul was the forced repatriation of Russian and Eastern European nationals to the tender mercies of Uncle Joe Stalin. Part of the deal was that Stalin would then release the thousands of Americans and other Western POWs that the Red Army had "liberated" and still held hostage. Needless to say, Stalin didn't keep his word and Washington quickly forgot about the Americans they had abandoned. West continues about the moral sewer that the USA was/is now occupying.

Here was a harrowing new development in our self-destructive relationship with Communist Russia. Having swallowed any number of Big Lies about Soviet atrocities (Terror Famine and on) to maintain sunny relations with the USSR, having perpetrated a Big Lie ourselves about a Soviet atrocity (Katyn) to continue to fight on as supposedly like-minded allies, the Western Allies went further still: We became accessories to a Soviet atrocity - a war crime and crime against humanity. (Pg. 232, emphasis in original)

America's moral degeneration was facilitated by the large numbers of Communist agents and fellow travelers in the Roosevelt administration. As noted above, their poison would quickly seep in all areas of American life. West provides amply proof that the Roosevelt and Truman (and subsequent) administrations were penetrated for top to bottom. She provides much evidence that the now sanctified Truman was a two-bit partisan hack in way over his head. When Truman was given overwhelming proof by the FBI that Communists operated freely in the executive branch, his reponse was to launch a cover up that included smearing whistle blowers like Whitaker Chambers. Truman's main concern was the upcoming election in 1948 and not American national security.

The truth of a Soviet occupied Washington is not new. Nor was Diana West the first to recognize it. 

The principal recruiter was Harold Ware, who held a first meeting of the Triple A [Agricultural Adjustment Administration] group at a violin studio owned by his sister on Connecticut Avenue. At the start, the cell consisted only of Ware, and three others, all attorneys: John Abt, Nathan Witt, and Lee Pressman; but from that microcosm there developed a shadow Soviet Government of America under the direction of J. Peters, the full range of which the Federal Bureau of Investigation would never be able to determine. (Anthony Cave Brown and Charles B. MacDonald, On a Field of Red, 1981, pg. 340)

There has been much noise about West's contention that Washington was occupied by the Soviet enemy during the Roosevelt, and later, administrations. But, there it is from nearly forty years ago: Soviet Government of America.

There is much controversy surrounding American Betrayal. Most of it stems from mendacious reviews that focused on details and ignored West's main thesis. One such detail is the nature of Harry Hopkin's treason. Was he a Soviet agent with a NKVD handler or did his treason just come naturally? We will probably never know. If there were any "smoking guns" in the National Archives, the documents have long since been shredded. 

Another issue is West's views on World War II strategy. I disagree with her on the "second front" and whether MacArthur's forces in The Philippines could have have been relieved regardless of Lend-Lease policy. These are just a few of countless, perennial World War II "what ifs" that honest and patriotic Americans can disagree on. West's critics aren't honest in this regard and, therefore, can't just agree to disagree. 

Ignore the critics and read the book for yourself. It's an eyeopening bombshell that all Americans should closely study.



* In her must read The Red Thread, West documents the hard left and neo-Marxist roots of the cabal currently attempting to overthrow a duly elected president. 

Regarding Non-Holiday Holidays

This past Columbus Day is a reminder on how much the "woke" left hates America and Western Civilization. Needless to say, the hate campaign against Christopher Columbus goes back decades. During the Columbus quincentenary in 1992 the vilification was thick. Of course, academic filth were in the forefront of the hate mongers:

And we will argue in this essay that Colón was indeed a murderer, culpable for those crimes against humanity as the head of an authoritarian regime just as readily as Adolph Hitler is held accountable for the murder of some six million Romas (the so-called Gypsies), Jews, and gays in Nazi Germany. 

The left's rancor has only gotten worse and more demented in the last twenty year. 

Oddly enough, the US Mint issued a commemorative coin for the anniversary in 1992. 

Columbus Day is still one of ten federal National Holidays. It was established in 1937. According to the feds, "It is celebrated every second Monday of October...." Not quite (although, "woke" federal "workers" happily take a paid holiday to commemorate literal Hitler). In many jurisdictions, Columbus Day has been "fundamentally transformed" into Stone Age Savage Day ... oops ... indigenous peoples day. This movement is just a part of the cultural jihad determined to destroy America. 

Racist Savages Protesting Indoor Plumbing

The same phenomenon occurs every year in Hawaii on Admission Day. State government "workers" get it off as a paid holiday. However, the Hawaiian victim lobby and other America haters have turned it into a "forgotten holiday."

Presidents' Day was created largely to denigrate the memory of two great Americans: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. A commemorative Civil Rights Day could have been created for a month like June or August which don't have a fedgov holiday. Or, King Day in January could have been established without messing with Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays. Instead, it was decided to go with airbrushing away the vast part of American history that doesn't fit the leftist narrative. Acknowledging the man most instrumental in the nation's founding and the man who saved the Union by bringing forth a "new birth of freedom" just wouldn't do. 

The left's war on Christmas has been largely a failure, except with those mumbling "happy holidays" on December 25th. It's hard to say which holiday will be their next target. Perhaps Veterans or Memorial Day. They hate the military and the troops. Although, their campaign to turn the military into another Post Office type jobs program is moving right along. Or perhaps, Thanksgiving with its Christian and "imperialist" connotations will be next on the chopping block. Time will tell. But, rest assured that the left's campaign to deconstruct America will never end until stopped by patriots.
 

Yaron Brook Discovers the Fifth-Column

Unfortunately, the fifth-column Brook calls out on his latest video are patriotic Objectivists who don't hate President Trump. More on this later, after the context is set.

Brook is really in a black pilled mood during the course of this tirade. He's all doom and gloom. He begins by criticizing the "far left" for its overt nihilism. But, he mainly characterizes the left as "nutty" and "insane." Of course, he did not identify the left (including the "Squad") as evil, which they obviously are. 

Brook then lashes into the "right." As is typical, he creates a strawman on who/what the "right" is and then attacks his own creation. He contends that the "right" is as hostile to individualism/freedom as the demented left. His view indicates a profound ignorance on the "right." He apparently doesn't frequent such popular "right" websites/blogs as PJMedia, Breitbart, Daniel Greenfield or the Gateway Pundit among many others.  

Instead, Brook cites Stefan Molyneux as an example of "right-wing" racism. He provides a single quote to support his contention. It could be anti-Semitism on Molyneux's part. Or, more likely, Molyneux was just pointing out Jeffrey Epstein's own, peculiar form of ethno-centrism. But, we can't have any of that. Brook also cites socialist Richard Spencer as representative of the mainstream "right." Then, of course, he lumps Donald Trump in with these two disparate individuals: 

Americans think they have to choose between the Squad and the crazy nuttiness of the left, and Donald Trump and the crazy nuttiness on the right.

How does he know this from his gated condo in Puerto Rico? When was the last time Brook actually talked to and listened to anyone in middle America? Actually, patriotic Americans know the choice is between a decent, if flawed, nationalist right and a globalist left that wants them dead and replaced. Brook even implies that it's time to strike;

This is what Ayn Rand meant by going on strike. Disassociate yourself and fight. Fight from the high ground.

Then, he states that his idea of striking is to speak out on Facebook and to get Rand's books into the hands of as many people as possible. John Galt did not strike by globe-trotting and giving speeches for an income of several $100,000 a year. John Galt did not strike from the "high ground" of a luxury condo in tax haven Puerto Rico.
 

Yaron Brook's Barricade of Freedom, Marius and Enjolras are not Available for Comment

At around the forty minute mark, Brook really lets his hair down and goes after who's really bothering him. Only an extended quote of his rambling diatribe can do it justice:

Those of you who are apologists for Donald Trump, please never use the word 'Objectivism' to associate it with yourself. Because you cannot be Objectivists. You are not Objectivists, if you apologize for this guy. 

And you are not doing anyone a favor by selling-out, selling-out the fundamental ideas that we are for. For the sake of what? Popularity, defeating the left? 

You're sell-outs, you're the fifth-column within Objectivism.

No, Yaron. The real sell-outs are making six figures at the Ayn Rand Institute. And, Yaron is at the top of the list. Popularity? Yes, the ObjectivistResistance is real popular with Brook and his minions. We have been called every name in the book by these Obleftivists. We have been demonetized by Brook's Soviet Valley heroes. But, the Resistance will keep fighting for the fundamental ideas we believe in.  

It should be noted that Yaron Brook would never characterize such creatures as Congressjihadi Ilhan Omar as fifth-columnists. That's exactly what they are. In fact, Obleftivists were in high dudgeon over Trump's statement that the America hating fifth-columnists should go back to their shitholes. But, he will use that term, which originally referred to Communist traitors, to describe Objectivists who are patriotic Americans. 

I don't ever apologize for Donald Trump. I do support his reelection and many of his policies. He loves America and wants a free, prosperous decent country. For this thoughtcrime, people like me are continually and viciously smeared by Brook and his AynRandbots. Yaron Brook doesn't get to decide who is or is not an Objectivist. He is not the Objectivist Pope.  

 

Addendum: On 15 October 2020 the Ayn Rand Centre UK posted a video "Celebration Leonard Peikoff." At the very end of which, Peikoff stated: 

"I am voting for Trump. That's it, ok? I'm not arguing but I heard someone say that no Objectivist would vote for Trump and I'm still steaming over that. I'm trying to publicize the fact that whoever said that is crazy." - Leonard Peikoff