U.S. Politics

[Lance Payette]

Dear Lance,

I'm guessing that one of your favorite authors is Ayn Rand.

Am I right?

Regardless, here's a news flash for you:

Your apparent savior-on-earth, Russian Mafia-mobbed-up-and-compromised Donald Trump, the most corrupt president we've ever had (read Craig Unger's books on him), wouldn't have become our "President" in 2017 and 2025 without the machinations of people like Roger Stone, Harley Schlanger, Julian Assange, Steve "I'm a Leninist" Bannon, Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, Oleg Deripaska, and Bill Barr, and the sixty-six years of Sun Tzu-like disinformation, "active measures," and (until at least 2001) mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations that the KGB has been waging against us and our NATO allies since 1959. This concerted attack on us by the USSR / Russia (and China!!!) has weakened our own intelligence services and made our body politic cynical, apathetic, and therefore super-vulnerable to the pro-Russia / anti-Ukraine disinfo that's being communicated to us via the likes of Fox News, OANN, and NewsMax.

Gag me with a SVR / FBI spoon, Mr. Payette.

-- Tom

For the record, Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged) was popular when I was in college, but I can honestly say I have never read ONE WORD of her writing. P. G. Wodehouse, yes.

I happen to disagree with The Donald's approach to Ukraine, as does my wife (very much), but it does fit his overall agenda to restore sanity within the U.S. borders and I am willing to wait and see what the final result will be. If Ukraine were Bolivia and thus not so close to my wife's heart, and the U.S. had been devoting that level of resources to Bolivia, I'm sure we'd both be more enthusiastic about The Donald's efforts.

I'm not the dullest tool in the shed, and I happen to believe your obsessive narrative is simply but largely false. The long march through the institutions, which has been extremely successful over the past 40-50 years, is a much more plausible narrative - and, rather oddly for your narrative, The Donald and his supporters are doing their best to pull the plug on the long march.

[Royell Storing]

  Trump ran on a Platform that he Openly Pitched at every single campaign rally. He was overwhelmingly elected on that Platform and is now implementing that exact same Platform, plank-by-plank-by-plank. You're now officially in the minority. You LOST! It took a while, but the electorate will rise up and did rise up last Nov. And the storming of ICE Detention Centers, or the Fire Bombing of private citizens/Voters cars, or the blowing up of car dealerships, etc, will Not change this. NOBODY is going to be intimidated into submission by a violent group of people that Only managed to carry 19 states. And remember that there were 11 states in the Confederacy. This is where you are Now at and where you are Now headed. Welcome to your torturous 4 yrs of extinction. 

[Lance Payette]

When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917, there was a genuine expectation that the proletariat would rise up in every country and that all of Europe (at least) would soon fall like dominoes. There was genuine surprise and disappointment when this didn't happen. At the same time, many American elite - academics and journalists - were enamored of Marxism and what the Bolsheviks had achieved. Hence, there has always been this Marxist-leaning strain within the ranks of the elite.

The notion of a long march through the institutions, as opposed to a revolution or war, is indeed the only realistic hope for a Marxist/Socialist transformation of a country like America. The educational system is the primary institution for achieving this. I graduated from college in 1972 but did not enter law school until 1979. Just in that time, the change was obvious. There are now 2-3 generations below me who are products of an educational system I don't even recognize.

Over the past roughly 40 years, the changes in American society wrought by the Left have ALL, without exception, been in furtherance of the long march. This is precisely why my USSR-bred wife said over and over again, "My God, this is exactly what the Soviets tried to do!" It has become so pervasive that I don't think many of its promoters - Pelosi, Kamala, AOC, et al. - are even aware that they are pawns in the long march.

It's an ideological march that has nothing per se to do with Russia or Putin. Putin is about as Marxist/Socialist as Trump. This is precisely why, at the U.S. Embassy in 1959, Snyder joked to Oswald that he was going to be a "very lonely guy" in Moscow if he was a Marxist. Trump's affinity for Putin, I believe, is because (1) Trump has an affinity for "winners," and Putin is a wealthy, powerful guy and (2) more significantly, Trump is above all a pragmatist who realizes that America benefits more from a stable relationship with Russia than with an unstable one. It's all about Trump's vision for America, which is pretty much the America I also knew.

What I don't understand is this McCarthy-esque "Russkie mania" of those like Tom. Everything Trump is doing is aimed at halting the long march and dismantling what it has achieved. To me, it's like saying a white guy with a Black wife and two adopted Korean kids is a white supremacist. How does that work?