Diana West

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 include The Death of the Grownup and American Betrayal (2013).

Early and personal life West was born and raised in Hollywood, Los Angeles to 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 from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. She has two daughters, and has later lived in Washington, D.C. and later went to New York City to work as a junior editor of The Public Interest, which was edited by Irving Kristol. until it was ended in 2014. It often dealt with controversial subjects such as the war on terror with a critical focus on Islam.

West has also been co-vice president of the International Free Press Society, and been described as part of the counter-jihad movement, a movement which she has praised in her column, including the blog Gates of Vienna. In 2010 she was a co-author of the Center for Security Policy's Team B II report Shariah: The Threat To America. 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." Christopher Orlet, writing in the American 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."

In the Michigan 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." A writer for Publishers Weekly noted that West presents "nothing less than the decline of Western civilization on the American counterculture." She argues that infiltration of the American government by Stalinist agents and fellow-travelers had significantly altered Allied policies in favor of the Soviet Union during World 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 of communism in the 1930s and the failure to face the threat of Islamic extremism today.

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

A Kirkus review 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."

Jonathan Chait, a liberal pundit and writer for New 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 at The Heritage Foundation and The American Spectator.

Andrew C. McCarthy also came to West's defense in a review-essay in The New Criterion, where he writes West relies on M. Stanton Evans' book that comes to the defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy and cites the "groundbreaking scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr" to back up Evans' claims.