American conservatives have an excellent new book to enjoy when they want to tune out the cacophony of lunatic leftists to which they’re subjected endlessly in the Age of Trump.
It is Diana West’s Wake Up and Smell the Culture and Other Selected Essays – a must-read collection of writings from one of America’s more gifted conservative thinkers, who has been fighting in America’s culture wars for decades.
Ms. West reminds me very much of another eloquent Yale-educated conservative iconoclast – the late William F. Buckley. They both offer insightful commentary on American culture from a 30,000 foot perspective. But Ms. West’s appeal to me also lies in her deep dives into the political intrigues of Washington. More below.
Ms. West has published a series of landmark books in her long and storied career as a journalist, social critic, columnist and book author. She began her writing career as an editor of the Yale Political Monthly while an undergraduate at Yale. She would go on to become a reporter for the Washington Times. She then became a syndicated columnist from 1998 to 2014, with her columns appearing in 120 newspapers and news sites. She has continued to write columns in various forums in the years since.
She wrote her seminal first book, The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, in 2007. It was a frank and refreshing assessment of an American culture in decline, in which adults lived in a perpetual state of adolescence, refusing to confront the hard realities of 21st century life. That book has not only aged well, but has become more relevant than ever, as many Americans in their 30s continue to live with their parents and refuse to grow up.
One of Ms. West’s greatest gifts is her ability to conduct intensive archival research, deeply trace the backgrounds of public figures, and then present her findings in a most compelling way for her readers. She did that in her last book, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, in which Ms. West teased out, through painstaking research, the very curious backgrounds of the central players who tried to take down Donald Trump before and during his first presidency. You remember them: Bruce and Nellie Ohr, James Comey, Christopher Steele, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and the Rest of the Treasonous Gang.
In her newest book, Wake Up and Smell the Culture, Ms. West has assembled decades’ worth of her essays from her very prolific career as a social and political commentator. And she doesn’t hold back, calling out both Democrats and Republicans, who were variously treacherous, feckless, and cowardly.
In an essay titled “America First: 1940-2016,” Ms. West offers a sweeping analysis of geopolitics. She explores the origins of the America First movement in 1940, a powerful and patriotic political force of that time, which brought many famous Republican and Democratic figures of the day together, focused on preventing America from becoming enmeshed in yet another European conflict. My own father, a young Columbia University graduate in the late 1930s, was of this school of thought. Although it would effectively vanish following Japan’s attack on the United States and Hitler’s declaration of war against us, Donald Trump would again recognize the need for America to place its own interests ahead of a warring world and resurrect the America First concept, focusing on rebuilding America from within.
In discussing the betrayal of both Republican and Democratic political leaders of American interests and their failure to place those interests first, she calls out George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, for their constant invocation of a “New World Order” – anathema to those of us who believe strongly in the nation-state system and the need for America to avoid entangling alliances.
But it is to the later essays of the book that I felt myself particularly drawn, in which Ms. West carefully parses the various political intrigues and very real conspiracies that have rocked Washington, DC and the wider world. I confess that in my role as a Senior Investigator for Judicial Watch, I have been deeply involved in the investigation of many of these intrigues myself, so my fascination for Ms. West’s analysis of them may reflect my own biases. It’s an occupational hazard.
Reading Wake Up and Smell the Culture was for me like a trip down memory lane. I had forgotten many of the details of these cases which, as I note, I was deeply immersed in researching for well over a decade. The murder of Seth Rich, Hillary Clinton’s treason with the Russians over the Skolkovo deal, the toxic mRNA Covid “vaccines.” The list is tragically endless.
Wake Up and Smell the Culture is a superb new addition to the curious conservative’s bookshelf and a testament to Diana West’s dogged research and perceptive analysis.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)
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