RUTHFULLY YOURS

Left Imperialism is an exercise in a novel field: ideology archaeology.

Is the United States Constitution conservative or liberal? Where does the conservative-liberal dichotomy originate? Are American conservatives related to British conservatives or not? Who are the anarchists―left-wingers or right-wingers?

Left Imperialism offers the answers to these questions and many more, taking on a spectrum of ideologies from a brand-new evolutionary perspective. For example, the book traces the origin of many standard political terms―like “left-wing” and “right-wing”―from their inception to the present through all their perturbations. It also examines in distinctive detail political movements like Conservatism, Fascism, Liberalism, Marxism, Anarchism, and many more, from as far away as Cardinal Richelieu’s epoch through World War II and into the present.

The book’s narrative has one overriding theme: the evolution of freedom.

Left Imperialism presents a novel concept in political philosophy called the “individual-state paradigm,” which generalizes and extrapolates the Right-Left distinction.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/25/tulsi-gabbard-steps-up-to-defend-religious-freedom-from-her-former-political-party/

Religious liberty is America’s “first freedom.” The founders knew well how having a national religion could erode true faith and tear a country apart. At the same time, they knew that a self-governing people, as they envisioned America, must agree on basic moral beliefs, and understand that our human rights derive not from any government in any form but from God. Government, they knew, can be and often is the most imminent threat to human rights, including the right to freely practice or choose not to practice any faith.

America’s first freedom is under sustained and coordinated assault, according to former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in her bombshell new book, For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind. Like those old thriller movies in which the mysterious calls from the killer were coming from inside the house, the attack on religious freedom isn’t coming from any outside entity or country. It’s coming from inside America.

Gabbard grew up in Hawaii in an eclectic home, by most Americans’ thinking. Her parents read to her and her siblings from both the Bible and the Rig Veda, the 5,000-year-old set of Hindu beliefs. This upbringing shaped her worldview and also taught her tolerance of people with different beliefs than her own and sharpened her eyes to recognize insidious attacks on religion. Her father was subjected to such attacks when he ran for office in her native Hawaii.

It’s without any glee that Gabbard calls out the party she once proudly belonged to—the Democrats—as a party that has abandoned religious tolerance and become a party that seeks to undermine people of faith, and especially Christians, at every turn. Wokeness has turned the Democrats into a party that, for all intents and purposes, is organized around destroying religion in America.

And Gabbard brings the receipts.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-save-the-west/

In his book How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises, Spencer Klavan has written a modern tour de force that straddles two realms. The first is that the book is a prescient and chilling analysis of the “five essential crises” facing Western civilization today:

The Crisis of Reality: Is there such a thing as objective truth—and even if there is, can “virtual reality” replace it?
The Crisis of the Body: Not just the “transgender” insanity, but the push for a “transhumanist” future;
The Crisis of Meaning: Evolution—both biological and cultural—is a process of endless replication, of copying. But is there an original model that gives us an aspiration to aim for? Do our lives and actions have meaning?
The Crisis of Religion: Science has not eliminated man’s religious impulse, but rather misdirected it—and wrongly dismissed the profound philosophical plausibility of Judeo-Christian revelation;
The Crisis of the Regime: Has America reached a point of inevitable collapse? Republican government was meant to end the destructive cycle of regimes rising and falling—but can it?

Second, Spencer Klavan takes us on a whirlwind and in-depth journey through the ideas of Western philosophy, literature, and classical thought both to bring into sharper relief these crises, and also to demonstrate how an application of ancient wisdom can be a plausible panacea to much of the malarkey, willed ignorance, and malice that constitute the crises facing Western civilization today.

I interviewed Spencer Klavan, a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford University and a senior editor at The American Mind, about his most recent book.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27717/chapter-14-changing-hearts-and-minds

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

On October 30, 2008, in Columbia, Missouri, candidate Barack Hussein Obama declared to an unsuspecting public, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming America.” It was the promise of a radical leftist to change the culture of America and move the nation from constitutional republic to socialism. John Dewey’s destruction of American minds through progressive education had a partner in Obama and the Culture War president Obama unleashed on America.

To move our constitutional republic to socialism and beyond, globalism’s leftist progressive movement adopted the binary victim/oppressor social structure of cultural Marxism. Classical Marxism identifies the oppressors as the bourgeoisie (owners of production) who exploit the proletariat (workers). The metric of classical Marxism is economics. Cultural Marxism re-labels the participants and defines culture, not economics, as the metric of exploitation. It is one species of the genus Marxism as described by James Lindsay in Chapter 11. In cultural Marxism, white males are the identified oppressors and everyone else is their victim.

Both classical and cultural Marxism seek to replace the existing order with collectivism, each selling its own idealized form of a secular heaven on Earth. Today’s social justice warriors who sign onto this leftist lunacy are ignorant of history, arrogant, and too childish to examine the objective reality of the offer. Leftist ideologues actually believe the fantasy of a Marxist Utopia, and don’t realize that the paradise they advocate is the powerless state of infantile dependence, the opposite of individual freedom. When infantile dependence is advanced into adulthood, it awards the state total control.

Her last book was Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011 

Her novel is a great read….rsk

Amy Chua’s debut novel, The Golden Gate, is a sweeping, evocative, and compelling historical thriller that paints a vibrant portrait of a California buffeted by the turbulent crosswinds of a world at war and a society about to undergo massive change.

In Berkeley, California, in 1944, Homicide Detective Al Sullivan has just left the swanky Claremont Hotel after a drink in the bar when a presidential candidate is assassinated in one of the rooms upstairs. A rich industrialist with enemies among the anarchist factions on the far left, Walter Wilkinson could have been targeted by any number of groups. But strangely, Sullivan’s investigation brings up the specter of another tragedy at the Claremont, ten years earlier: the death of seven-year-old Iris Stafford, a member of the Bainbridge family, one of the wealthiest in all of San Francisco. Some say she haunts the Claremont still.

The many threads of the case keep leading Sullivan back to the three remaining Bainbridge heiresses, now adults: Iris’s sister, Isabella, and her cousins Cassie and Nicole. Determined not to let anything distract him from the truth—not the powerful influence of Bainbridges’ grandmother, or the political aspirations of Berkeley’s district attorney, or the interest of China’s First Lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek in his findings—Sullivan follows his investigation to its devastating conclusion.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/new-faith-defenders

This past year’s National Book Awards gala presented an ironic, yet at this point increasingly familiar scene: Held in the glittering halls of Cipriani’s on Wall Street, the attendees—dressed in their finest, dining at one of New York’s famed upscale spots—spent the evening showering prizes on a very specific subset of writing: for young people’s literature, a graphic memoir of an awkward Asian American teen coming of age during a class trip in Europe; for translated literature, a novel about an old gay man who reflects on his clandestine teenage romance with his best friend; for poetry, a collection about the history and culture of the Chamoru people native to Guam; for nonfiction, a Howard Zinn-style history of the United States from a Native American perspective; and finally, for fiction, an experimental novel about two queer Puerto Rican men that wax on about the work of a pioneering sexuality researcher. Other finalists for the fiction award included a novel about Black prisoners being forced to fight to the death for the amusement of racist white viewers, a novel about three generations of Native Americans forced to attend boarding schools set up by racist white government officials, and not one, but two novels about racist white Christian missionaries that try to convert BIPOC souls.

The message was clear: In the book business, at least, it literally pays to be a victim.

Of course, the authors of trauma narratives are simply playing their part in a symbiotic dance with the trauma-hungry gatekeepers of elite spaces. Readers of this magazine are no doubt familiar with the “woke meritocracy” of American academia and letters, according to which the only entrance to the upper echelons of American society is gatekept by those who seek to “check their privilege” and feel absolved through the consumption of victim narratives. Every college student who dreams of ascending the ivory tower knows that the people at the top reward those that can claim their rise was prickled with thorns, just as every struggling product of elite overproduction desperately tries to think of how many victim identities they can check off in an ever-shrinking pool of positions in academia and the workplace.

There is, of course, a paradox in the demand for “diverse voices”: Rather than seeking an actual diversity of viewpoints, our DEI commissars instead seek a racially diverse group whose members will hold the same viewpoint. This one off-the-shelf sob story is now the only viable route to elite advancement.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27686/chapter-13-fomenting-race-wars-begins-in

goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

National sovereignty is to a country what individual sovereignty is to a human being. In The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage,[i] I describe the globalist strategy of using reformulated Marxism in American schools in order to replace American individualism with collectivism. The goal is to persuade the individual to stop being an individual:

The Left had a new marketing, lobbying, and advertising strategy that targeted first American universities and then K–12. American education was chosen as the vulnerable soft target for revolution—no bullets required. The long-term strategy was that two generations of leftist educational indoctrination would transform America from a capitalist constitutional republic into the socialist state required for internationalized one-world government.

The radical leftists on campus in the ’60s did not go quietly into the night after Woodstock. They graduated and became the teachers, professors, textbook writers, psychologists, sociologists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and decision makers in charge of public education, including curriculum content, that reflected their anti-American bias and globalist views. Gradually the individualism and critical-thinking skills that had created the vibrant, independent, upwardly mobile middle class and supported the American dream were deliberately dumbed down to encourage dependence, collectivism, groupthink, and a victim mentality.

In a sweeping effort that eventually transformed public education, collectivism was repackaged, marketed, lobbied, advertised, and sold to an unsuspecting American public. The former pro-American curricula that proudly promoted individualism, meritocracy, capitalism, and the middle class was replaced. The revised curricula teach American students to be anti-American, self-loathing, dependent, fragile collectivists, unapologetically preaching global citizenship in a New World Order. (The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage, pp. 123–124)

Collectivism is the core of John Dewey’s infamous progressive education, discussed in Chapter 8. Progressivist instructional methods focus on group work and group projects, and promote the experience-centered focus of the progressive philosophy. Progressivism defines itself as a contrast to Perennialism. Perennialism,[ii] the foundation of American education established in Colonial America, emphasizes objective reality, universal truths, and an educational curriculum that cultivates students’ individual intellectual skills with the “three R’s”—reading, writing, and arithmetic.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ready-for-freedom

Everyday Freedom: Designing the Framework for a Flourishing Society, by Philip K. Howard (Rodin Books, 128 pp., $15.83)

“Everyday Freedom calls on individuals, families, and communities to exercise newfound authority in the pursuit of flourishing lives. By the last page, the book acts as a mirror, staring back at readers with a challenging question: Are we ready to live up to the responsibilities of such freedom?”

In a now-obscure 1960s BBC interview, Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, journalist, and convert to anti-Communism (and later Christianity) declared: “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.”

That sentiment of Muggeridge’s—the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s—is the starting point of Everyday Freedom, the latest book by attorney and good-government advocate Philip Howard. Reformers of that era felt that biased individuals couldn’t be trusted with discretion. Those in power had given American society racial segregation and other forms of discrimination, destructive urban-renewal projects, and environmental costs that would be paid by future generations. The reformers believed that the way to prevent unfair and unjust outcomes was to limit and check authority.

But the worthy goal of limiting institutional power ran aground with the reformers’ emphasis on grievance and resolution. Howard chronicles how the discretion that had characterized an earlier mode of governance gave way to a new system of individual rights and impersonal rules. Dense rulebooks came to dictate the “one correct way” for workers to do every task. Formal processes constrained executives from disciplining employees and planning for new development. Expansive civil rights, and a bureaucracy designed to enforce them, added arrows of state power to the quiver of every student and individual suffering personal disappointment. The prospect of massive jury verdicts turned these rights into a “weapon for selfishness,” leading to absurdities like a $54 million case against a Washington D.C. dry cleaner for losing a customer’s pair of pants.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/marxism-the-next-generation/

If more Americans had been familiar a couple of decades ago with the history recounted in the pages of Next Gen Marxism – a cogent, comprehensive new book by Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Katharine Gorka, an expert on the terrorist threat (and Sebastian Gorka’s better half) – a lot would be different. For one thing, Barack Obama would almost certainly never have been elected president. Fewer people would’ve been suckered into the George Floyd hysteria. Parents would’ve been warned a lot sooner about the existential danger of sending their kids off to study in the Ivy League. And that’s just for starters.

For the history told in Next Gen Marxism is the history of what we now know as wokeness – the leftist sociocultural ascendancy manifested in (among much else) cancel culture, the Antifa and BLM riots, DEI, “judicial reform,” “squatter’s rights,” the near-ubiquitous promotion of transgender ideology, and (not least) the conspiracy of Hollywood, the media, the D.C. swamp, and Big Tech to destroy Donald Trump’s first term and deny him a second.

It can feel as if the woke madness slithered out of nowhere, like some poisonous snake, just a few years ago, only to be coiling itself tightly around our throats very soon afterward. But in fact, this toxic creature has a long lineage that leads back to Rousseau and the French Revolution in the 18th century, Marx and Engels in the 19th, and the Russian Revolution in the 20th. Then there’s Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose revolutionary writings – notably his theory of hegemony – have made him, in the authors’ words, “the unrivaled Marxist political theorist of the past half century.” (And guess who, of all people, is America’s “top Gramsci scholar”? None other than Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph. It’s one of a number of surprises here – surprises that, perhaps, shouldn’t be quite so surprising.)