Book of the Week: ‘Reclaiming Common Sense’

https://www.realclearbooks.com/book_of_the_week/2020/08/19/book_of_the_week_reclaiming_common_sense_574721.html

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this RealClearBooks series, we highlight recent nonfiction books from across the political spectrum. This week’s book is Robert Curry’s ‘Reclaiming Common Sense’, published by Encounter Books.

In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age, Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, Robert Curry describes a war on reality that spilled from the academy into all corners of American life and scrambled our rational mind in the process.

Though BLM, gender, and environmental activists often dominate our post-truth headlines, the left’s war on common sense is not merely intended to advance noisy progressive pet schemes. In fact, Curry reveals, subverting the truth as we know it is central to a far a more insidious plot to erode and eliminate the very conditions that make our Constitution work. For, as Curry writes, a war on reason is a war on the mind itself, and with it our capacities to think clearly and govern ourselves.

In a series of thoughtful vignettes, Curry urges Americans to preserve our fragile republic by restoring the common-sense realism that informed our Founders and grounded our nation as a shared project. These wise passages are essential reading for those who see and feel America drifting into a surreal state. In fact, as Reclaiming Common Sense underscores, those perceptive powers are the very thing that unite us and make our experiment in self-rule possible. Don’t let them go.

In Dark and Divisive Speech, Obama Seeks to Turn Back Clock on America Andrew Stiles

https://freebeacon.com/parody/in-dark-and-divisive-speech-obama-seeks-to-turn-back-clock-on-america/

To the delight of professional journalists, former President Barack Obama gave a jaw-dropping speech at the Democratic convention on Wednesday. Its dark and divisive tone signaled an attempt to drag America backwards by electing the man who served for eight years as his vice president.

Obama’s speech was the rhetorical equivalent of a culture war Hiroshima blast. It offered some token words of praise for Joe Biden, whom he repeatedly urged not to run, but was infused with the desperate rantings of a man who needs to be praised. “He made me a better president,” Obama said, effortlessly hogging the spotlight as usual.

Obama assailed the convictions of Donald Trump supporters, suggesting they “don’t believe” in American principles. He cast the stakes of the upcoming election in stark terms, inviting Americans to fear their neighbors, described only as a nefarious “they” secretly plotting to destroy the country from within.

“They are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter,” Obama said while making threatening hand gestures at an oversized U.S. Constitution—an ominous backdrop for a speech teeming with vengeful rage. “That’s how they win.”

AD Jerusalem Post Opinion Who’s afraid of a fourth round of elections? – opinion Cries of ‘Bibi must go’ couldn’t me more ironic, with most Israels having no desire to return to the ballot box for the fourth time in under two years. By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/whos-afraid-of-a-fourth-round-of-elections-opinion-639375

Israel’s High Court of Justice on Wednesday rejected a petition by residents of Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood – the location of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official Balfour Street residence – that the continuous mass protests in the area be limited or halted completely.

According to the dozens of petitioners, the demonstrations not only have been causing a severe disruption to their daily lives – with the deafening din disturbing their sleep – but pose a health risk. After all, participants at these events, many without face-coverings, or who wear their masks around their necks, gather in the thousands, making it impossible for them to adhere to coronavirus social-distancing regulations.

Justices Uzi Vogelman, Yael Wilner and Alex Stein ruled that due to the special status of the Prime Minister’s Residence, the rights of political protesters must be given priority over those of neighborhood denizens. The judges also opined that a reasonable balance between the rights of the demonstrators and residents has been achieved through the presence of police, who have been entrusted with enforcing COVID-19 mandates.

So far, however, enforcing the law at these events has been difficult, leading to clashes between police and demonstrators, with the former using water cannons as one method to disperse oversized crowds.

Chicago’s Terror Cells Is it time for Trump to send in the troops? Jason Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/chicago-descends-anarchy-jason-d-hill/

Last week in Chicago saw the most major of American cities in the Midwest descend into chaos and mayhem as looters and rioters took to the city’s downtown streets and unleashed a reign of destruction and nihilistic terror. Acting under the pretenses of social justice, and outrage at police brutality against blacks, anarchists and Black Lives Matter supporters reveal a desire not to peacefully protest whatever reasonable grievances they think they might have, but rather to destroy principles of civility, property rights and the First Amendment. And, of course, they also clearly wish to unload their absolute unfiltered hatred of law enforcement.

More than 100 people were arrested between Sunday night and Monday morning after an overnight spate of violence that seems to have begun with a 20-year-old man who, unprovoked, opened fire at police officers. Thirteen officers were injured in displays of violence around the city. Police Superintendent David Brown on Monday described the incident not as peaceful protests, but as incidents of pure criminality.

On Monday evening, the looters, rioters and anarchists again struck the wealthy section of downtown Chicago’s Gold Coast region, looting and destroying designer stores including Ralph Lauren, Jimmy Choo, and Geneva Seal. U-Haul trucks were seen waiting on the sides of roads to deposit the burglarized property from the city’s prime real estate area. 

A Black Lives Matter Chicago organizer said Monday that the mobs who vandalized and looted downtown businesses the night before did nothing wrong, calling it “reparations” for Black suffering.

Undignified Obama What an ex-president’s inflammatory and hateful nominating-convention address was made of. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/undignified-obama-matthew-vadum/

Last night Barack Hussein Obama gave what was probably the most undignified, inflammatory, hateful nominating-convention address of a former president in the history of the United States.

“This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” he said August 19, puffing himself up with a studied indignation.

This is the same, shameless, Saul Alinsky-worshiping liar who presided over a seditious plot, a rolling coup attempt, to overthrow his successor using the CIA and FBI, the early outlines of which this writer sketched in Obama’s Insurrection.

The real-life conspiracy to oust Trump, though not (yet) successful, has allowed Democrats and their Deep State allies to practice these dark arts over the past four years that they may soon use to remove the mentally incompetent Joe Biden from the Oval Office to pave the way for Kamala Harris, who is not black despite what her publicists in the media say, to become president.

No one in the media seems to have noticed that the party of LGBT and racial utopia is now headed by a man who is apparently not completely convinced of the rectitude of those causes.

Calling Out Democrats’ Lies at Lame Zoom Convention By Rick Manning

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/19/calling-out-democrats-lies-at-lame-zoom-convention/

The biggest lie, among many, at the Democratic Party’s Orange Man Bad Fest on Tuesday night was that President Trump did not act aggressively or effectively to save lives from the Chinese coronavirus.

Here are a couple of key facts that Bill Clinton must have missed: President Trump ended flights from China in January, only to be attacked for “hysterical xenophobia” by former Vice President Joe Biden in Iowa on February 1. President Trump ended travel from Europe in March to the dismay of Democrats, including Biden who said the order was “counterproductive.”

On March 13, as part of a larger announcement by President Trump on COVID-19 response, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an updated Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance for how nursing homes should handle coronavirus cases.  

These measures, along with the Trump Administration’s historic industrial mobilization to ensure Americans have the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) to fight the coronavirus, are saving lives. The Monday morning quarterbacking at the Democratic convention this week is simply an attempt to deflect from the failed policies of their own party leaders, specifically New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo forced nursing homes in his state to accept COVID-19 patients, knowing those facilities could not treat them. His recklessness infected the most vulnerable populations in the state with the deadly virus and was in direct violation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidance. The CDC directed nursing homes to only admit COVID patients if “the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions” and to keep only those COVID-infected patients for which they could safely care for. 

China’s Growing Influence on Campus American academia majors in appeasement. By Curtis Ellis

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/19/chinas-growing-influence-on-campus/

The U.S. government has opened a multifront assault on the Chinese Communist Party’s infiltration of American institutions.

Chinese companies that don’t abide by American securities laws will be delisted from U.S. stock exchanges under an executive order signed by the president. Another order prohibits federal workers’ pension funds from being invested in Chinese-controlled companies. Yet another keeps a growing number of companies, American and foreign, from doing business with Huawei, the Chinese telecom-cum-cyberespionage giant.

These moves follow a series of speeches by top administration officials outlining the threat the CCP poses to our way of life. 

Our government is pushing back, and there is no shortage of targets. The FBI has nearly 1,000 investigations in all of its 56 field offices involving China’s attempted theft of U.S. technology.

Corrupted Professors

University campuses are a major front in the war. 

The FBI arrested Charles Lieber, the chairman of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology department, for accepting millions of dollars from the Wuhan virology lab and then lying about it. 

A UCLA professor was convicted of taking CCP money to illegally send semiconductors with military applications to China. 

A University of Kansas professor hid the fact he was working full-time for a Chinese university while he was conducting federally-funded research here. 

One of the top researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas didn’t reveal he was also being paid $14 million by a cancer institute in China.

The Department of Education told the University of Texas to turn over details of its relationship with the Wuhan virology lab (yes, that one!) and other Chinese institutions. Washington has put all universities on notice to disclose donations they receive from CCP sources (which would include any company or individual from the People’s Republic). Under the Higher Education Act, colleges and universities are required to report contracts or gifts of $250,000 or more from foreign sources.

Kamala’s Lies By David Keltz

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/kamalas_lies.html

Last week when Joe Biden officially announced Kamala Harris as his running mate on August 12th, 2020, Harris made what amounted to one of the most dishonest speeches by a vice-presidential candidate in recent memory.  “This is a moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about, our economy, our health, our children, the kind of country we live in, it’s all on the line,” she said.  Harris, who appears to have been honing her acting skills during the pandemic, unleashed a bevy of emotions during her remarks, as she went from “cheerful,” to “empathetic,” to “nostalgic,” to “indignant,” and finally back to “cheerful,” all in a matter of seconds.  In a desperate attempt to portray herself as humanizing, relatable, and down to earth, she instead reminded us all why the robotic Hillary Clinton was seen as untrustworthy and was immensely unpopular.  Duplicity aside, perhaps the only details of Harris’s speech more cringeworthy than her insincerity was her inability to tell the truth about virtually anything.

Harris heavily criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, blaming him for the death toll, the economic contraction, the high unemployment rate, the closure of schools, homelessness, hunger, and poverty.  “The case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open and shut. Just look where they’ve gotten us, more than 16 million out of work, millions of kids who cannot go back to school, a crisis of poverty, of homelessness afflicting black, brown, and indigenous people the most, a crisis of hunger afflicting one in five mothers who have children that are hungry and tragically, more than 165,000 lives that have been cut short, many with loved ones who never got the chance to say goodbye.”

The DNC virtual convention – a pitiful and appalling sham By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/the_dnc_virtual_convention__a_pitiful_and_appalling_sham.html

So far, every speaker at the Democratic National Convention has studiously failed to even mention the violence and looting across America’s cities, a horror they have otherwise promoted by their silence and their failure to condemn it.  

Michelle Obama talked a lot about empathy but had none for the thousands of victims of the riots and extreme violence those groups have wrought upon Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, etc.  No empathy for the small business owners who have lost their only source of income, their livelihoods.  Not a word.  No empathy for the thousands of police officers who have been attacked, injured, blinded and/or defunded.  The Democrats have made common cause with the anti-police movement; blue lives no longer matter to Democrats.   

At this point, it is safe to say that the Democrat party is anti-American and decidedly anti-Constitution.  Their platform of open borders, free college tuition, health care for all comers would, as any sentient person knows, bankrupt the nation but that’s their plan and they are sticking to it. They want to abolish ICE, prisons, and the police.  Their 90-page platform is ludicrous.  ‘

The recruited speakers submitted their little screeds outrageously lying about what President Trump has accomplished, blaming him for every COVID death, virtue-signaling themselves into absurdity.   The convention so far is reminiscent of a high school project produced while the teachers were on strike — amateurish and embarrassing.  

Ms. Obama, John Kerry, Caroline Kennedy, Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton, poor irrelevant Hillary, et al, presumed to lecture us all on income inequality while they luxuriated in their multi-million dollar mansions. Most of them own several mansions.  Oh, and we must not re-elect the president because Orange Man Bad.  That was the extent of the wisdom in all their little Zoom talks.  Yet the Obamas, since they left office, have amassed more wealth than any other ex-presidential pair in history.  Their shallow hectoring will likely continue to be a bad joke all around.  

Meanwhile, Joe Biden remains absent while his handlers pretend he is a viable potential president.  …Who is?  The person who was the first to drop out of the presidential primaries for lack of support, the person who quite literally slept her way to the top with a powerful man, gave herself a Chinese name to garner Chinese votes, and who imprisoned countless people for marijuana use, not sale, but use.  Kamala Harris ignored the sexual abuse of young boys by priests; follow the money. In short, she was a terrible prosecutor and AG in California and is a terrible person, one without a moral compass.

Can Terrorists be Deradicalized? – Part II by Denis MacEoin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15643/can-terrorists-be-deradicalized-part-ii

However pure religious Islam was in its earliest phase, after Muhammad came to rule in the city of Medina and during the successive caliphates that followed his death in 632, it became a dogma that the state must be ruled by Islam, its beliefs, and its laws. Today’s radicals, whether in Iran or as newcomers in Western societies, apparently consider this a view worth fighting to uphold.

As far as Western countries are concerned, radicalization appears to rest on three things: education in many Muslim schools, upbringing in unintegrated Muslim families, and the intensity of close-knit Muslim communities.

When implemented, these measures will certainly increase the likelihood of long-term deradicalization. But more still needs to be done to prevent the spread and acceptance of radical views in the first place.

In the first part of this analysis, “Can Terrorists be Deradicalized? Part I,” of the ongoing threat of Islamic radicalism in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, it seems to have proven difficult to take convicted terrorists and turn them into pious Muslims who repudiate violence.

The great irony, as some reports have shown, is that the very fact of being imprisoned or, in some instances, being trained in deradicalization courses can actually result in further radicalization. So far, not enough work has been done to identify and act on this problem, but it has been recognized by experts such as Ian Acheson. And the UK government has published important findings on the subject.

The truth is that many modern Western states seem to have trapped themselves in a range of social attitudes — such as the well-intended wish to show empathy or sound hospitable, or a fear of offending, or laws condemning “hate speech”, or simple self-censorship — that can unfortunately ignore or even sustain radical Islamic belief systems. This is not to say that the UK, France, or other countries actively promote the sort of radicalization that so often leads to acts of terror; but our failure to act, our insistence on political correctness, combined with a need to appear innocent of anything that might conceivably be considered anti-Muslim “hate crimes”, often leads to such results.