Displaying posts published in

July 2020

Purifying Publishing The cultural commissars come for conservative books. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/purifying-publishing-bruce-bawer/

Of America’s most powerful and prominent cultural institutions, it’s quick work naming those that aren’t entirely left-wing satrapies. TV? Fox News, although things are looking less and less encouraging there. Colleges? Hillsdale, I guess, though how many Ivy League faculty members would ever admit to having heard of it? Newspapers? The New York Post (sometimes), Wall Street Journal (kind of), and perhaps one or two others from sea to shining sea. Silicon Valley? Nothing. Hollywood? ¡Nada! Big business? Hmm: what is there, nowadays, honestly, other than that My Pillow guy?

One field in which there’s at least a soupçon of ideological diversity is the book trade. Yes, staffers at the major publishing houses are overwhelmingly on the left. Ditto bookstore employees. Plus the people who give out the major book awards. Not to mention that the heftiest advances for political books go to Democrats. Since the turn of the century, the biggest nonfiction book deal, amounting to at least $65 million, was for Michelle Obama’s Becoming (2018) and for an as-yet-unpublished opus by Barack; second – raking in $15 million – was Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004); third – at $14 million – was Hillary’s Hard Choices (2014).

One more thing about the reflexive leftism of the book scene. Thanks to today’s lethal cancel culture, even classics are at risk. Recently, in an article for the School Library Journal headlined “Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with ‘Classic’ Books That Are Also Racist,” Marva Hinton identified both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as racist. No, she didn’t just say that they contained racist language, which would have been fair enough; she asserted that these two books – both of them key texts in the history of the American struggle against racism – are in fact racist.

Bret Stephens, the Gray Lady, and ‘The Great Awokening’By Noah Carl 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/bret-stephens-the-gray-lady-and-the-great-a
A small piece of advice for anyone preparing a submission to the New York Times: do perform a thorough background check on each and every person you intend to cite.

A spike in the level of outrage on Twitter is by no means a rare event. Regular users are accustomed to glancing over at the “Trending” tab to see who or what has raised people’s hackles that particular day. It is not so common, however, for that type of spike to be generated by something published in America’s newspaper of record, still less an instance of outrage that should prompt the editors of said newspaper to issue a major correction and an “Editor’s Note.”

Many will recall that Twitter went into meltdown on June 3, after the New York Times published a bellicose op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) titled “Send In the Troops.” But this is not what I have in mind. The event to which I’m referring took place at the end of last year, and although it is but one squall in a vast and tempestuous sea of online indignation, I believe it offers some valuable insights into cultural trends in the English-speaking world.

The kerfuffle began when Bret Stephens—whose journalistic career, even before the event in question, had not been completely divorced from controversy—published a column titled “The Secrets of Jewish Genius.” In the column, Stephens argued that the reason Jews have made such outsized scientific and cultural contributions is not that they are smarter than other groups, but rather that they have benefited—over the course of their history—from certain beliefs, practices and traditions. These would include being asked “not only to observe and obey but also to discuss and disagree” and understanding that “everything that is intangible—knowledge most of all—is potentially everlasting.” In fact, the column’s original subheading was “It’s not about having high I.Q.s.” (Stephens even went so far as to say “what makes Jews special is that they aren’t,” suggesting that explanatory coherence was not his primary concern.)

A Reign of Error By Anthony Esolen 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/a-reign-of-error/

What we think about things can be as important as the things themselves, because it forms our moral stance toward the world. But what if our thoughts are in error?

At the end of The Unheavenly City: The Nature and the Future of Our Urban Crisis (1968), Edward Banfield presents a prospect regarding race relations that seems to have been fulfilled since his tumultuous years and ours: a reign of error.

Let me set the stage. America had become the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and the wealth was making its way to the lower classes also. Thus the main “accidental factor” that had locked Americans in a vicious cycle of white discrimination and prejudice on one side and low standards and attainments for blacks on the other would be largely alleviated. Such prejudice, said Banfield, writing during the years of urban riots, was already in decline.

By any reasonable criterion, he was correct about that decline. Consider, for one example, our nearly universal acceptance of interracial marriage. Such acceptance was unimaginable when “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture of 1967, largely on account of its message (for a much superior and gut-ripping film on interracial marriage, racial animosity, and rank injustice, see 1964’s “One Potato, Two Potato”). More than 1-in-6 new marriages in the United States are interracial. That alone, I had once thought, would suffice to put those animosities to rest, as it had done between other embittered groups.

Every Day Brings Another New Low For American Journalism Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084

President Trump calls it the “fake news.” I’ve tried to steer mostly clear of that term, but it just gets harder and harder. You keep thinking that it must be possible to turn to some newspaper or TV news channel for just some basic information on what is going on in the world. But it turns out that the desperate effort to come up with something, anything that will defeat the Republicans or the President requires distorting or suppressing even the most basic facts of what is happening.

There were three years of the Russia, Russia, Russia collusion hoax. Has any media outlet that promoted that fraud ever issued any sort of apology or correction? If so, I have never seen it. Ditto for the Ukraine “quid pro quo” that wasn’t. Just this past weekend, Trump gave what I thought was a very decent and unifying patriotic speech at Mt. Rushmore. Here is the text. For every major left-wing media outlet, it was “dark” and “divisive.” Try reading the text and see if you can find that. Could they really think that nobody would read the text?

But then, the significance of Trump’s speech is a matter of opinion. Let’s consider a matter much closer to simple fact: the number of daily cases and deaths from the Covid-19 virus in the U.S. Figures are reported daily, with charts going back to February, at various places, including a site called Worldometers that I have frequently linked. While there are reasons (that I have discussed in several posts) to think that these data might not be fully accurate, they are still the basic data that we all are working with.

What If It’s All A Lie? Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/07/07/what-if-its-all-a-lie-n2571940

Would you be shocked to learn that a big hunk of the citizenry is absolutely convinced that Donald Trump will not only be re-elected but re-elected in a landslide? It’s true, and it’s not an ironic or performative belief, but rather one drawn from a perspective that the mainstream media utterly ignores. This means you probably have no idea it even exists, and that could lead to an unpleasant surprise in November.

Well, unpleasant for you.

Remember that apocryphal anecdote about how Pauline Kael moaned that she did not know anyone voting for Dick Nixon? If you’re here, then that’s very likely you.

You can dismiss these people as stupid – many of them really believe that Jesus stuff, deny systemic racism, and have no fear of civilization being destroyed by the weather in a decade or so. 

After all, President Hillary Clinton did.

Washington vs. Violent Crime By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/washington-vs-violent-crime/

The Feds can help address surging urban crime. They cannot quell it.

In New York City, 49 people were shot over the holiday weekend. The death count, so far, is eight. With 101 shooting victims in the last week, shootings are up 300 percent over the same period last year; for the full month of June, they reached a level not seen since 1996. Even before this latest bloodbath, murder was already up by 79 percent over last year; violent and property crime rates are likewise spiking.

Naturally, the hard-Left Democrats who run Gotham figure this is a perfect time to slash $1 billion out of the NYPD budget (a 17 percent cut), and to deny judges the power to detain most accused felons pretrial.

Though significantly smaller by population, Chicago is even worse. Ninety people there were shot over the weekend, with 18 killed. At least a dozen of the murder victims were minors, including seven-year-old Natalia Wallace, whose killing bears the hallmarks of gang violence. Just finished with first grade, she was out playing in a yard with friends. Suddenly, a car screeched to a halt. A group hopped out and started blasting, a round striking the child in the head. A young man, who was also shot and wounded, was probably the main target, but the depraved shooters do not appear to have discriminated. A few hours later, just a short distance away, a 14-year-old boy was one of four people killed in another hail of bullets.

Meanwhile in Atlanta, eight-year-old Secoriea Turner was killed when some of the ubiquitous “mostly peaceful protesters” opened fire at the car in which she was sitting. They had angrily confronted the driver who tried to enter a liquor store in the area they’d cordoned off — just a few blocks from the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed in June after instigating a deadly confrontation with police. All told, the city saw at least 31 people shot and five killed over the weekend.

Know Your Enemy: Undeniable Truths About the Left By Dex Bahr

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/know_your_enemy_undeniable_truths_about_the_left.html

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.  If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”— Sun Tzu

As my high school football coach used to say, “It is time to fight like men or hike up your skirts and say, here it is.”  Freedom-loving, patriotic Americans need to take a deep breath, calm down and accurately assess the current cultural and political situation in the country. It is time to stop reacting to what the left does and instead focus on some undeniable truths about our enemies.  Victory only comes after finding your opponents’ weaknesses and exploiting them, but such flaws cannot be found without honest and careful study.  This is how patriots fight.

First, we must begin by properly labeling the truth as it is. For example, everything that is happening now is because the left’s plans to remake the United States from a Constitutional republic into borderless global state were thwarted by the people electing Donald J. Trump for president.  As a result, the left not only hates Trump for beating their savior Hillary Clinton, it also loathes the citizens who voted for him. 

Once you honestly grasp the level of hatred the left has for us, you begin to understand that the Wuhan virus extended lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter/Antifa led riots are for express purpose of bringing misery and terror to those who dared to vote for Donald Trump in 2016 and those who are planning to vote for him in November. The left has turned up their intensity to eleven in their ongoing effort to isolate Trump from his base.  Democrat governors and mayors are holding your Constitutional freedoms hostage and the unspoken ransom for you to make all this desolation go away is to vote Democrat. “Abandon this ogre, Trump, and things will go back to how they were before you made the mistake of voting for him.”

MAPPING THE MEGA LOANS: $1MM TO $10MM MADE TO “SMALL BUSINESSES” THROUGH THE PPP It’s time to follow to money! Adam Andrzejewski *****

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/07/07/mapping-the-mega-loan

Yesterday, the Small Business Administration released data on which businesses received forgivable loans under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in amounts between $150,000 and $10 million.

So, who received how much taxpayer money through the program? Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com mapped the big loans – the nearly 83,000 loans between $1 million and $10 million. These businesses are located in 13,700 zip codes across the country.

Now, you can find out yourself, zip code by zip code, with an interactive tool we’ve built on our government transparency website.

This mapping tool allows users to quickly review every PPP transaction exceeding $1 million. Just click a pin (zip code) and scroll down to see the results that will appear in the chart beneath the map.

Coercive enemies of the Republic By Victor Sharpe

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

In 1776, a mere 244 years ago, the Declaration of Independence was signed by a new nation that arose with a divinely inspired document that challenged directly the assumed power of a king. It did so by abolishing the very status of royalty itself. The Constitution secured and protected the Natural Law Rights and sovereignty of each individual by limiting the authority and power of a centralized government.

For years that was our American Republic. But what of it now?

We have every reason to be tormented by what a far-left Democrat party wishes for the nation. Leftist politics are disinterring the corpses of Socialism and Marxism, along with the hate filled ideologies we had thought were blessedly gone from our world. Socialism is being embraced by students in our schools and colleges without any knowledge of the horrors it has produced. But there is a glimmer of hope, for as Arthur Herman writes in a recent article titled “Don’t underestimate Trump,” Democrats have to worry that when voters wake up in October, they’ll see a president who has managed not one, not two, but three heavy lifts, however imperfectly, while Democrats did their best to shutter the economy and let their radical offspring run wild in the streets.

We who love this United States of America and the Constitution are increasingly alarmed at the hate and violence prevailing in today’s Democrat party with its extreme leftism, globalism, coercive identity politics, and open borders that threaten our very future. What we are witnessing now is what George Orwell foresaw in his dystopian world to come.

Texas Doctor Reverses Coronavirus Symptoms in 100% of Cases With Inexpensive Treatment

https://beforeitsnews.com/health/2020/07/texas-doctor-reverses-coronavirus-sympt

Texas family doctor Dr. Richard Bartlett joins Debbie Georgatos on her show American Can We Talk to discuss a potential COVID CURE!

Dr. Bartlett describes how he has been treating Covid-19 patients with 100% success rate using an inexpensive safe treatment that is commonly used for people with asthma.

The treatment is enhaling a steroid called budesonide using a nebulizer. Dr. Bartlett says many patients experience rapid relief from Covid symptoms after the first treatment.

It’s the same treatment that worked in crowded countries like Taiwan, Singapore and Japan who’ve had very few deaths compared to countries that locked down. Therefore, Bartlett questions the effectiveness of mandatory masks, social distancing or a vaccine.

He explained that a vaccine is unnecessary because the mortality rate is so low and effective treatments already exist. And he emphasized that vaccines would be ineffective because of constant mutations to the coronavirus.