U.S. And International Politics

[Lance Payette]

I wholeheartedly agree except perhaps replacing "Marxist ideology" with "Establishment ideology".   American politicians just pick one of two establishment ideologies and ride it to the bank.  Spending money to stay in power and enriching themselves.  Repeat endlessly.

The idea of a long march through the institutions flows from Antonio Gramsci to Sol Alinsky to his disciples like Hillary. https://www.acton.org/religion-liberty/volume-29-number-3/antonio-gramscis-long-march-through-history. It's a fundamentally Marxist notion. Many are helping to further this ideology without any realization that it flows from Gramsci and is a fundamentally Marxist agenda. My wife, who spent the first 37 years of her life in the USSR and the next 17 in Soviet-style Belarus, came to America to join me just as Obama was elected the first time. I can't tell you how many times over the next 15 or so years she'd read the news and say with dismay, "My God, this is just like the Soviet Union! This is just the sort of stuff they tried!"

[Tom Graves]

I'm not extremely political, but as someone who has at least observed the country for 75 years I firmly believe the country, for far longer than any Biden-Trump controversy, has been steered toward oblivion via the proverbial "long march through the institutions" of Marxist ideology. Trump inherited a country that was literally on the brink of nonexistence, at least as those of us who lived from 1950 (or earlier) to 1990 knew it. I believe he sincerely thinks, and rightly, that he has a very limited amount of time to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg. Hence, decisions with potentially vast consequences are being made far more quickly than they would have been in 1950, 1960 or 1970. It can indeed be disorienting. I don't believe for one minute there is any agenda other than to "Make America Great Again" in the sense of what the term "America" meant to me and people like me from 1950 to 1990. Is that a whiter, more conservative, more Judeo-Christian nation than many today would prefer? Well, yes, it is - but that doesn't mean an inevitably racist, intolerant, bigoted nation either. In the view of Trump and his supporters, the term "America" at least has some meaning; if the Marxist long march through the institutions were to prevail, the term "America" would eventually mean nothing at all. I do see it as a civil war that someone has to win and someone has to lose; the Pelosis, Kamalas, Shumers, AOCs, et al., are simply attempting to eradicate all that has made America what it has always been, and I frankly don't care what measures Trump has to take to bring their efforts to a screeching halt.

Wow, that was pretty good! One more Guinness Stout and I'll start preaching!

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

[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?

[Tom Graves]

What I don't understand is this McCarthy-esque "Russkie mania" of those like Tom.

Dear Lance,

Either remain incredibly naive and ignorant, or do the following:

1) Read Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and his 2014 biography of former KGB General Sergei Kondrashev, Spy Master.

2) Read Blacklisted by History: The Untold History of Senator Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies by M. Stanton Evans, and Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government by Evans and Herbert Romerstein.

3) Read the 1984 book, New Lies for Old, by Anatoliy Golitsyn, the KGB Major who helped devise the deception-based "Master Plan" (strategic disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence ops) in the late 1950s, and who defected to the U.S. in December 1961. (His defection is the reason General Gribanov sent Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva six months later). Something like 90% of the falsifiable predictions he made in the book had come true by the time Mark Riebling wrote his 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and the CIA (which book you should also read).

4) Read Masha Gessen's 2012 book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

5) Read Craig Unger's books, House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat.

6) Go to Substack and read at least some of my 316 free-to-read articles under my banner, "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI."

7) Stop watching Fox News, OANN, and NewsMax.

BTW, do you happen to remember "Anna Chapman & The Twelve (or was it thirteen?) Dwarfs," whom the FBI FINALLY rolled up in 2010, i.e., ten years after they started integrating themselves into American and Canadian society, which itself was ten years after "The Fall of the Iron Curtain," "The Dissolution of the USSR," and the "Demise of the KGB"?

Did you know that Igor Danchenko (naive Christopher Steele's primary source for his raw-intel dossier on your boy, Trump) at the Brookings Institution was suspected of being a KGB* agent back in 2006 or so, and the only reason the gumshoe FBI stopped investigating him in 2010 was because it thought he had permanently left the country?

I could go on and on.

Suffice it to say that your fascistic hero, Donald J. Trump, got in bed with the Russian Mafia (and, by extension, the KGB) in 1984 (if not before), when he started laundering money for them in NYC.

Hooray!

We Won the Cold War!!!

Now let's stomp out (pardon the pun) Socialistic Medicaid and Social Security, deport people (including U.S. citizens) without due process, give more huge tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations, declare effing Martial Law "if we have to," and move our country closer to Civil War (just like (apparently) Steve "I am a Leninist" Bannon and fascistic mob boss and "former" KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin want us to!!!).

-- Tom

PS *Today's SVR and FSB

[Lance Payette]

Geez, if the KGB (sorry *SVR and FSB) has all the superpowers that Tom attributes to them, I almost hope he's right - Trump and the KGB (sorry *SVR and FSB) together should clean up this mess we call a country even quicker than I had anticipated! I already speak about 900 words of Russian, so me and missus will be OK. Does Putin play golf, I wonder?