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BOOKS

N. S. Lyons Twilight of American Democracy? A new book argues that an elite class of influential Americans took control of the ship of state.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/twilight-of-american-democracy

It’s been a confusing summer for those who still believe nothing is amiss about the American republic. One moment the sitting president was, according to the near-universal insistence of mainstream media, sharp as a tack—all evidence to the contrary declared disinformation. The next he was suddenly agreed to be non compos mentis, unceremoniously ousted from the ballot for reelection, and replaced through the backroom machinations of unelected insiders. Overnight, the same media then converged aggressively to manufacture a simulacrum of sweeping grassroots enthusiasm for that replacement, the historically unpopular Kamala Harris. To call this a palace coup via the New York Times would not seem to stray too far from observable events.

What, some may wonder, just happened to our supposedly sacred democracy? A growing group of dissident right-wingers has sought to supply an explanation. United around the premise that the governance of the United States doesn’t function as we’re told it does, this group believes that the country has not operated as a constitutional republic for some time; it is only the façade of one, effectively controlled by a cadre of plutocratic elites, party insiders, unelected bureaucrats, and subservient media apparatchiks—in short, an unaccountable oligarchy.

Among the sharpest recent guides to this argument is a slim new book by the columnist and influential young New Right thinker Auron MacIntyre, titled The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.

CHAPTER 35: Artificial Intelligence and America’s Children__Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is* by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28046/chapter-35-artificial-intelligence-and-america

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

It is time to take a look at what the globalists have in mind for little Johnny and Humanity 2.0. We begin with a history lesson provided by Dr. Michael Rectenwald in his April 14, 2023, article, “Hacking Humanity: Transhumanism”:[i]

The term transhumanism was coined by Julian Huxley, the brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley and the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In an essay entitled “Transhumanism,” published in the book New Bottles for New Wine (1957), Huxley defined transhumanism as the self-transcendence of humanity:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.1

One question for transhumanism is indeed whether this transcendence will apply to the whole human species or rather for only a select part of it. But Huxley gave some indication of how this human self-transcendence might occur: humanity would become “managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution….”2 As the first epigraph to this Part makes clear, Julian Huxley was a proponent of eugenics. And he was the President of the British Eugenics Society.3 It was in his introduction of UNESCO, as the director-general that he suggested that eugenics, after the Nazi regime had given it such a bad name, should be rescued from opprobrium, “so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”4 As John Klyczek has noted, “In the wake of vehement public backlash against the atrocities of the Nazi eugenic Holocaust, Huxley’s eugenics proper was forced to go under-ground, repackaging itself in various crypto-eugenic disguises, one of which is ‘transhumanism.'”5

You Can’t Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms 1st Edition by Keith E. Whittington (Author)

Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians?

The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections shielding them from political interventions. Those assumptions might always have been more hopeful than sound. A battle over the control of the university classroom is now brewing, and the courts will be called upon to establish clearer guidelines as to what – if any – limits legislatures might have in dictating what is taught in public universities.

In this path-breaking book, Keith Whittington argues that the First Amendment imposes meaningful limits on how government officials can restrict the ideas discussed on university campuses. In clear and accessible prose, he illuminates the legal status of academic freedom in the United States and shows how existing constitutional doctrine can be deployed to protect unbridled free inquiry.

Why the West Must Fight for Its History Frank Furedi

https://quadrant.org.au/features/ideas/why-the-west-must-fight-for-its-history/
Dr Frank Furedi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. This was an edited extract from his introduction to his new book, The War Against the Past, to be published by Polity this month.

There was no formal declaration of war. No gunshots rang out. It didn’t even make the local news. But, sure enough, at some point at the turn of the twenty-first century, a war against the past was launched.

Who were the culprits? They are hard to pin down. The partisans supporting the assault on the legacy of European civilisation are not members of a party. They have not issued any war aims and have never formulated an explicit strategic vision. They are also a heterogenous bunch, a coalition of disparate interests and movements.

In an earlier era—the 1990s—when the first wave of mobilisation was taking shape, the English historian J.C.D. Clark warned against representing the promotion of this conflict as the “outcome of a grand conspiracy”. He wrote that it is “the result of a thousand separate, distantly related acts, the promptings of widely absorbed assumptions”. Nevertheless, argued Clark, despite its diverse and uncoordinated prompting, it amounted to a “distinct enterprise of historical disinheritance”.

Hostility towards the past evolved slowly, and then all at once, its intensification occurring haphazardly without any serious long-term thought. The use of the term “war” to account for the systematic pursuit of historical disinheritance is not simply metaphorical. In effect, this war leads to the diminishing of the authority of the past, to the discrediting of its legacy and to the killing of the soul of communities whose way of life remains underpinned by European culture.

This book’s principal argument is that the main driver of the culture war is an undeclared War Against the Past.

At times, supporters of the culture war against Western civilisation behave as if this perilous territory continues to represent a menace to the contemporary world. Their constant targeting of the legacy of the past—its physical symbols, values and achievements—resembles a frenetic moral crusade seeking to make people feel ashamed about their origins and who they are. Culture warriors have, in effect, opened up a second front to gain mastery over how the past is viewed.

The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilisation is pursued through reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement. They seek to erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past to achieve this objective. There has never been a time in living memory when so much energy has been devoted to readjusting the past and questioning and criticising historical figures and institutions. At times, it seems as if the boundary between the present and the past has disappeared as activists casually cross over it and seek to fix contemporary problems through readjusting the past.

CHAPTER 34: In a World Obsessed with Feelings, Whose Feelings Matter? Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is* by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28017/chapter-34-in-a-world-obsessed-with-feelings

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Hidden deep within the Gospel of Yuval Harari is the question “Do children belong to their parents or to the state?” Harari’s position clearly favors the state, because the “intelligent design” he describes is an arm of the state body politic. To repeat what he said at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos on January 24, 2020:

In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to reengineer life, and even to create completely new life-forms. After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.

Harari’s “evolutionary” biology sees human beings as hackable animals whose future will be shaped by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and the reengineering of life into new life-forms. The new life-forms Harari refers to are transhumanist beings totally controlled by the globalist elite—the “intelligent designers.”

To “transcend” means to go beyond the range or limits of something. Transhuman means going beyond the current limits of being human and acquiring the powers and abilities of an enhanced human being in what the World Economic Forum calls “Humanity 2.0″—the stated goal of “intelligent design.” Harari’s narrative is grooming your children for Humanity 2.0.

To understand the insidious plan to move humanity from Humanity 1.0 to Humanity 2.0, it is necessary to examine the tactical shift away from meritocracy—the traditional metric of achievement foundational to American life, progress, and success.

In a society that eliminates meritocracy by shifting its metrics from achievement to feelings, whose feelings actually matter? What is the political purpose of the shift?

How the Anglosphere Eradicated Racism In a definitive book, a distinguished historian demolishes the academic consensus. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-anglosphere-eradicated-racism/

Now 88 years old, John M. Ellis studied German at London University, has taught at a series of universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and has written several books that are critical of the corruption of the humanities by ideology. His newest book, A Short History of Relations between Peoples: How the World Began to Move beyond Tribalism, is a fascinating and utterly timely piece of work. Why timely? Because we are living in an era when millions of people in the Anglosphere have been taught that the history of their countries is something to be ashamed of, marred by centuries of racism and white supremacy, and that we therefore should not only look with disdain upon our forebears but should applaud when statues of men and women once considered to be heroes of our civilization are torn down.

It’s all a lie, and Ellis challenges it brilliantly. Rather than judge our most prominent and accomplished ancestors by the moral standards of our own day, he argues, we should recognize that they themselves contributed, generation by generation, to the development of those very standards. Ellis sums up those standards with the Latin term gens una sumus, meaning, as he puts it, “that we human beings are all of one family.” Today this assertion is considered self-evident. But five centuries ago it wasn’t. On the contrary, up until around the year 1500, people living in different parts of the world did not look upon foreigners with a sense of common humanity. Instead, they were possessed – every last one of them – of a strong sense of tribalism.

CHAPTER 33: Weaponizing Children: The Gospel of Yuval Harari Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is*

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27999/chapter-33-weaponizing-children-the-gospel

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Klaus Schwab and fellow members of the World Economic Forum (WEF) embrace a vision for the future that is difficult to fully grasp, but it is essential that people attempt to do just that. Yuval Harari, Israeli historian, professor, and darling of the WEF, provides a glimpse of that future and of Humanity 2.0 in his books and lectures.

Schwab and Harari embrace globalism’s supremacist replacement ideology as an evolutionary inevitability, in the same way Marx and Engels believed it was a historical inevitability that a socialist revolution would overturn and replace capitalism.

The term historical inevitability was introduced by philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his lecture “Historical Inevitability,”[i]delivered on May 12, 1953, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Berlin argued against historical inevitability because the view that “the world has a direction” requires deterministic laws. Berlin considered determinism implausible because it requires radical changes in people’s “moral and psychological categories.”

Berlin’s view does not dissuade the humanitarian hucksters at the WEF from hawking globalism’s Unistate and Humanity 2.0, the artificial expediting of the evolutionary process, as historical and evolutionary inevitabilities. In their arrogance, globalist supremacists insist that their ideology is superior to any other ideology or social infrastructure, and will inevitably dominate the world. It is a very convenient philosophy of life for megalomaniacs and sociopaths.

‘The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide’’

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/08/20/the-california-left-coast-survivors-guide/

 Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To order the book, click here.

With California’s Kamala Harris being inspired by what Gov. Gavin Newsom calls “The California Way,” nonpartisan California free-market think tank the Pacific Research Institute has released a new book giving Americans the facts and knowhow needed to stop bad California ideas from taking root nationally.

“The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide: A Pacific Research Institute Handbook to Help the Rest of America Avoid Making a Wrong Left Turn” is now available at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. Visit this page to learn more.

Inspired by the handbooks that have prepared eager adventurers for years, “The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide” provides lessons on how to survive the progressive wilderness creeping in from California, presented in a reader-friendly – often humorous and entertaining – format complete with dozens of illustrations that will inform and inspire readers.

The book covers topics ranging from crime and homelessness to green mandates, reparations and housing, and restrictions on worker freedom. It leverages PRI’s front row seat for 45 years to bad Sacramento policies to educate readers how to avoid Left Coast policy mistakes in their states and instead follow the path to prosperity through lower taxes, entrepreneurship, less red tape, and more opportunity for all.

“It is our hope that readers will learn from California’s mistakes and be inspired to help their states and communities avoid making a wrong left turn – instead making the case for market-based reforms,” said co-authors Kerry Jackson and Tim Anaya. “Our book is a warning for the rest of the country.”

Click here to order “The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.“

CHAPTER 32: Transhumanism, Big Lies, and the Great Reset Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is* by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27985/chapter-32-transhumanism-big-lies-and-the-great

: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com

We begin our discussion of transhumanism with its 2018 description from the World Economic Forum (WEF), “What is transhumanism and how does it affect you?”:[i]

The central premise of transhumanism is that biological evolution will eventually be overtaken by advances in genetic, wearable and implantable technologies that artificially expedite the evolutionary process…. The result is an iteration of Homo sapiens enhanced or augmented, but still fundamentally human….

Some distinguished scientists, such as Hans Moravec and Raymond Kurzweil, even advocate a posthuman condition: the end of humanity’s reliance on our congenital bodies by transforming “our frail version 1.0 human bodies into their far more durable and capable version 2.0 counterparts”.

Transhumanism is the political ideology promoted by the globalist elite in their quest for immortality. “Humanity 2.0” is the biological objective of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and stakeholder capitalism is its economic engine.

Klaus Schwab, the premier 21st-century humanitarian huckster, is selling stakeholder capitalism as the central feature of the Great Reset, WEF’s economic recovery plan in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Schwab is selling enslavement dressed up as freedom, with the infamous slogan “You will own nothing and be happy.” In reality, stakeholder capitalism is a return to the binary sociopolitical system of feudalism, where you will be an indentured serf who owns nothing because the elite own everything, including you.

CHAPTER 30: Marxist Past, Present, and Future__Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is by Linda Goudsmit posted August 4, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27965/chapter-30-marxist-past-present-and-future

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

The woke leftists advocating Marxist Cultural Revolution in America continue to believe in “real” socialism—Karl Marx’s perfect socialist society, the perfect communism that transcends private property. Woke young people have yet to discover that they are means, not ends, in globalism’s War on America. The woke are useful idiots, Marxist soldiers conscripted into service to collapse America from within, whose lives will be terminated once their usefulness expires. There is no place for agitators in the globalist managerial Unistate.

We all live our lives within a historical context. Understanding history is essential for making sense of the present, and for being able to anticipate the future. James Lindsay’s warning, “A Note to Young Woke People,” in his May 2, 2023, New Discourses article, “Intersectionality Is American Maoism,”[i] provides a compelling description of tomorrow for woke idealists participating in America’s Cultural Revolution today:

A Note to Young Woke People

I think you’ll find what I have to say to you mostly incomprehensible, but you need to hear it.

This is what you are participating in, whether you know it or not. This is what your schools and universities and influencers are miseducating you—brainwashing you—into. Western Maoism. Maoism with American characteristics. And this is what you need to know about where it goes. The whole philosophy is based upon the formulations of Georg W. F. Hegel’s vision for how to move History to its intended “End” (the right side of history), and what Hegel said about you is this: “History uses people and then discards them.”

As a movement Woke believes itself to be the movement of History. History is using you to move itself. It will discard you. You know how everything in Woke philosophy is “temporal,” “spatial,” and “contingent”? So are you. You are a contingency for the Woke movement. You have your time—until you don’t. When you become useless or a hindrance to the movement of History, you will be discarded. Every Marxist and Hegelian movement in history has proceeded this way, and this one will not be different. I wish you luck with that.

What you need to understand about the people you’ve been trained to see as your “enemies,” or “transphobes,” “racists,” “fascists,” “homophobes,” or whatever else is that most of the people you think are those things are not those things at all. You have been trained to hate, allegedly in the name of “stopping hate.” These people are, by and large, trying to warn you, not trying to uphold “oppression.”

What you need to know about the people in the movement you’re supporting, including your friends in the movement, is that you’re less than disposable to them. Contingent barely covers it. The Woke movement pretends to care about you—or, worse, “people who look like you”—but it does not. It is using you so its sociopathic fringe can gain power over society, using you as cannon fodder for their unconventional political warfare apparatus. Instead of living your life, growing, learning, preparing a future, you’re doing activism, for them. And they will discard you. Will. You are worse than disposable once they get power: you’re a problem.