Diana West

For the expert on breastfeeding issues, seeDiana West (lactation consultant).

Diana West
Born	(1961-11-08)November 8, 1961 Hollywood, California,U.S.
Education	Yale University(BA)
Occupations	Author columnist

Diana West(born November 8, 1961) is an American conservative author and former columnist. She wrote a weekly column from 1998 until 2014 that was syndicated nationally. Her books includeThe Death of the Grownup(2007) andAmerican Betrayal(2013).

Early and personal life

West was born and raised inHollywood, Los Angelesto Elliot West, a conservative novelist and television and screenplay writer, and Barbara Belden, a one-time actress.She moved to the East Coast and graduated fromYale Universitywith aBachelor of Artsin 1983.She is married and has twin daughters, and has later lived inWashington, D.C.

Career

West was an editor ofYale Political Monthlywhile an undergraduate student at Yale,and later went toNew York Cityto work as a junior editor ofThe Public Interest,which was edited byIrving Kristol.She thereafter began working as a reporter forThe Washington Times,and won the first prize in 1990 for best feature writing by theNational Newspaper Association.She began writing her weekly column in 1998.The column was later syndicated in about 120 newspapers and news sites,until it was ended in 2014.It often dealt with controversial subjects such as thewar on terrorwith acritical focus on Islam.

As a formerCNNcontributor, she frequently appeared onLou Dobbs' showsLou Dobbs TonightandLou Dobbs This Week.

West has also been co-vice president of theInternational Free Press Society,and been described as part of thecounter-jihadmovement,a movement which she has praised in her column, including the blogGates of Vienna.In 2010 she was a co-author of theCenter for Security Policy's Team B II reportShariah: The Threat To America.She has also been a contributor toBreitbart News.

The Death of the Grownup

West published her first book,The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilizationin 2007.The book argues that "Americans have become overly complacent with the world around us, particularly the ideological conflicts between Islam and the West, as a result of our desire to perpetuate our youth."

Reviews

AKirkusreview said the book "offers a bright, readable, often overwrought indictment of a popular culture that keeps Americans in a state of perpetual adolescence".Christopher Orlet, writing in theAmerican Spectator,argued that "West does not advocate a return to some golden pre-war era, but she does prescribe a booster shot of old-fashioned adult values. Sounding refreshingly like our parents and grandparents before them, West warns that we need to grow up and get serious about life."

Writing inThe New York Times Book Review,William Grimesobserved that "West makes a principled, conservative cultural argument unflinchingly" throughout the text. Grimes concluded that "West, in her style of argument, shows herself to be more a child of the 1960s than she might care to admit. In the end the facts matter less than the emotions." He also thought West's discussion about a failure to confront Islam was awkwardly fit for the book's topic.

In theMichigan Review,Rebecca Christy "agreed with the common topics of American pop culture West covers", but found that "the flow of this book… is stopped abruptly, though, when West begins a discussion of Islamic terrorism."Stefan Beck, forThe New Criterionargued that "West may get hysterical at times, but the most significant aspects of her argument are all but undeniable. Values have indeed replaced virtues."A writer forPublishers Weeklynoted that West presents "nothing less than the decline of Western civilization on the American counterculture."

American Betrayal

West's second book,American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character,was published in 2013. West argues that after thefall of the Soviet Union,historians failed to sufficiently "adjust the historical record" to account for newly available Soviet files and archives. West writes on the extent ofSovietinfluence during theRooseveltandTruman administrations.She argues that infiltration of the American government byStalinistagents and fellow-travelers had significantly altered Allied policies in favor of theSoviet UnionduringWorld War II.

Reviews and responses

Frank J. Gaffney Jr.finds that West "painstakingly documents how America's government, media, academia, political and policy elites actively helped obscure the true nature of the Soviet Union."West contends that there is a parallel with the failure to face the dangers ofcommunismin the 1930s and the failure to face the threat ofIslamic extremismtoday.

Frank T. Csongos argues that West is right "up to a point." He notes that West rejects the standard narrative that Franklin Roosevelt, likeGeorge W. Bush,took drastic steps to "save capitalism." Unlike West, he believes that Roosevelt was merely naive when trustingJoseph Stalin.

AKirkusreview finds that she has a number of valid points but her additional doubtful speculations go too far. It notes that, "Not until the 1990s, with access to the Venona files and Soviet archives, have historians wholly appreciated the scope of Russian spying in this country from the time FDR formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933. West matches these new revelations to previously known facts and wonders why we’ve neglected to fully adjust the historical record." It ends with the warning: "A frustrating mixture of incontrovertible facts and dubious speculation. Proceed with caution."

Former Canadian newspaper publisher andFranklin D. RooseveltbiographerConrad Blackpublished a critique ofAmerican Betrayalin the conservative journalNational Reviewin late 2013, to which West responded and Black then rejoined. Like Radosh, Black believes West grossly exaggerates Soviet influence in the Roosevelt Administration, whose policies were driven by the extreme social and economic crisis America was going through during the Depression. Black believes the alliance with the Soviet Union in World War II, while driven by realpolitik, was a dire necessity to prevent the victory of Nazi Germany which had already conquered France and was threatening Britain, and finds West's dismissal of the D-Day invasion of Normandy as somehow the result of Soviet subterfuge to shift the strategic thrust from the campaign in Italy to be an absurd and amateurish contention that ignores the realities of logistics and terrain. All these authors also point out that for the first two years of World War 2 during the period of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, widely considered odious among liberals, the policy of the FDR administration was at loggerheads with that of the Soviets in aiding Britain through Lend-Lease and point out the irony that at that time communists allied with isolationists and the America First movement, whose legacy West extols.

Jonathan Chait,a liberal pundit and writer forNew York magazine,says that West's "thesis that American foreign policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower was secretly controlled by the Soviet Union" has found supporters atThe Heritage FoundationandThe American Spectator.

Andrew C. McCarthyalso came to West's defense in a review-essay inThe New Criterion,where he writes West relies onM. Stanton Evans' book that comes to the defense of SenatorJoseph McCarthyand cites the "groundbreaking scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr" to back up Evans' claims.

Harvey KlehrandJohn Earl Haynesclaim West made serious historical errors, the most egregious being that Harry Hopkins was the Soviet spy "source 19" named in theVenonatranscripts, who they believe the evidence shows was actuallyLaurence Duggan,aU.S. Department of Stateofficial.

Bibliography

• The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.St. Martin's Griffin. 2007.ISBN978-0312340490.
• Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis.Co-authored as Team B II. Center for Security Policy Press. 2010.ISBN978-0982294765.{{cite book}}:CS1 maint: others (link)
• American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character.St. Martin's Press. 2013.ISBN978-0312630782.
• The Rebuttal: Defending 'American Betrayal' from the Book-Burners.Bravura Books. 2013.ISBN978-1492884538.
• No Fear: Selected Columns from America's Most Politically Incorrect Journalist.Bravura Books. 2013.ISBN978-1484180228.
• The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.Center for Security Policy Press. 2019.ISBN978-1076939630.

External links

• Diana WestonTwitter
• Official website(archived)
• Biographyand links to syndicated columns atTownhall.com
• AppearancesonC-SPAN