THE STORY WE HAVE HERE IS truly stranger than fiction. You can’t make this stuff up; I couldn’t if I tried. What is presented in this book is the truth as I see it, after carefully analyzing countless texts, articles, documents, interviews, and speeches.
This combing through documents to verify their authenticity is a process that today, it seems, has fallen by the wayside. A process that has shifted from the ones who should be doing it, the news media, to the ones who shouldn’t have to, the general public. To be sure, this cultural shift has an unintended consequence: a transfer in autonomy. No longer are the ones supplying the information responsible for fact-checking their sources before releasing them for public consumption. Instead, the responsibility now lies in the hands of the public.
Like most historical trends, this didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow and gradual shift that occurred in tandem with the rise of the internet and other social media platforms that allow news to travel twice around the world before anyone thinks to question its veracity. Yet there is a silver lining to this shift: a newly forged path has been carved out, creating platforms for independent voices to reach a wider, more discerning audience without the constraints of traditional media broadcast.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.
There’s a quotation often attributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.” Twain’s sentiment continues to ring true today—perhaps even more so now than when it was first written well over a hundred years ago. With countless media outlets, a decline in journalism, and general disregard for the truth—where the measure of success is through ratings and likes and clicks, not accuracy—it’s no wonder that a document like the Trump-Russia dossier, which is undoubtedly fabricated, has cemented its place as a political fork in the road, blurring the once-drawn line in the sand between fact and fiction.
“This book connects all the dots in the plot to destroy Trump. It is the most politically explosive book of the year.”
—Caroline Wheeler, Sunday London Times
And yet it’s not just the media that bends the truth. These news outlets are often just the last line of defense, a buffer of sorts, between the truth and the public. Sometimes they’re reporting what they were told. To find the truth, we have to go back further and deeper. Like a game of telephone, the farther we go back, the more the message and story is distorted. And yet, if we step away from it all as we try to connect the dots from a distance, we see it’s part of a bigger picture—something more than just media, which is a mere cog in this great machine. This machine, as we’ve come to know it, is what we call the Deep State: a collective group of government agencies and select individuals who hold great power to manipulate, distort, and downright falsify the information that will be released to the media and then to the public, ultimately changing the course of world history.
Deep State
This Deep State is at the heart of our hunt for Red November: a conspiracy orchestrated by anti-Trump forces that begins with memos written by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele for Fusion GPS, an intelligence firm. From here, the trail opens up, spreading its reach throughout Washington—including the FBI, the DOJ, and the CIA—as these forces work together to fabricate a narrative to delegitimize, subvert, and ultimately depose President Trump. This is Red November.
And yet as this story of Donald Trump’s alleged nefarious connection to Russia continues to unfold—a complicated, tangled web of people and places and meetings and questionable timetables and events—we’re missing one piece to this puzzle: tangible proof of any wrongdoing or collusion between Trump and his Russian adversaries. Despite this, the mainstream media continues to run this story that makes you dizzy just trying wrap your head around it. It’s far too complicated. And it only gets complicated if you’re lying. It’s not complicated if you’re telling the truth.
As so it has become in our world today, the information out there from the left media is both disparate and confusing, each outlet and talking head offering cloudy versions of the story that only further overwhelm consumers. These news outlets force readers and viewers to sift through the information and disseminate what is truth and what is not.
A challenge to mainstream media
The purpose of this book is to cut through the clutter and to provide you with an alternative to the mainstream media’s foregone conclusion that relies solely on salacious, unverified gossip that will produce higher ratings that translate into high ad revenue. And more, they know that this is what their audience wants to read. They know that their consumers will sop up this gossip and come back for seconds because it fits in nicely with their narrative—reaffirming their political beliefs, not challenging them—further deepening their echo chambers. This is dangerous: it’s an attack on true discourse and open dialogue. If we can’t tolerate alternative opinions that question our own beliefs and ideological stances, then the result is paralysis: the slow and inevitable death of a nation.
This book serves as a challenge to mainstream media and thinking and to the widespread notion that there is some sort of nefarious collusion between President Trump and Russia. My aim is to lay the facts out as clearly as possible for you, the reader, to see the difference between fact and pure fiction.
The story I present to you on the pages that follow is an attempt to peel back the layers, tracing that telephone line back to the source and revealing the real story: a story that was still putting its shoes on while a great big lie was traveling halfway around the world. This story, as Winston Churchill once put it, is a riddle, wrapped up in a mystery, inside an enigma . . . but perhaps there is a key.
—Theodore Roosevelt Malloch – March 2018
About the Author
TED ROOSEVELT MALLOCH, SCHOLAR-DIPLOMAT-STRATEGIST, IS ALSO Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Roosevelt Group, a leading strategic management and thought leadership company.
He has served as Research Professor at Yale University, Senior Fellow at Said Business School, Oxford University, and Professor of Leadership and Governance at Henley Business School.
His most recent books concern the nature of virtuous enterprise, the practices of practical wisdom in business, the pursuit of happiness, and the virtues of generosity, prudence, and thrift. His most recent book is entitled Common Sense Business.
He has served on the executive board of the World Economic Forum (Davos); held an ambassadorial level position at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland; worked in the US State Department and Senate Committee on Foreign Relations; worked in capital markets at Salomon Brothers on Wall Street; and sat on a number of corporate, mutual fund, and not-for-profit boards.
Ted earned his PhD in international political economy from the University of Toronto, took his BA from Gordon College, and an MLitt from the University of Aberdeen on a St. Andrews Fellowship.
“Providing a fact-based counter-narrative to that of the establishment media, Dr. Malloch represents what should be the real American interest in the 2016 election and beyond—that Russia and other nations have an inherent interest in weakening the legitimacy of the President of the United States. The media—alongside Democrats and even former British spies—are actually assisting Kremlin interests.”
—Raheem Kassam, editor, Breitbart
