RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/a_forgotten_voice_speaks_of_the_horrors_of_auschwitz.html

Holocaust denial is gaining traction among young Americans. 

A December 2023 poll by Economist/YouGov found 20% of respondents aged 18-29 years believing that the Nazi massacre of six million Jews is a myth. 

The antidote could be reading Jozsef Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium.  This haunting memoir of a year as an Auschwitz inmate, first published in Hungarian in 1950, was only last year translated to English and 12 other languages, thus reaching the wider world.

Like Primo Levi, a more famous Auschwitz memoirist, Debreczeni was captured in 1944, as the Nazis, in retreat, inched toward defeat.  Otherwise, he may not have survived.  As with Levi, Debreczeni’s training – Levi was a chemist, Debreczeni a reporter, editor, and poet – enabled him to write with detachment about the Nazi atrocities, the horrific conditions in the camps, his suffering and that of others, and the dehumanization of guards and inmates alike. 

Thus, the dark ironies stand out starker.  A kapo, chosen from the prisoners and accorded privileges in exchange for disciplining and brutalizing the rest, is shocked to realize he has been denounced to the commandant by other kapos.  He is calling out in a booming voice the ID numbers of prisoners selected to stand separately.  Everyone is afraid, not knowing their fate.  The hapless fellow comes upon his own number, but must continue reading the list to the end.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-cold-and-bloody-war-with-china/

In November, Biden and Chinese Communist President Xi met once again, this time at the mansion used for the exteriors of the TV show, ‘Dynasty’, to talk about the relationship between the two countries. And yet all these months after the three hour meeting, nothing changed.

Biden had met with Xi everywhere from the Bay Area to Bali with no result. Why?

In ‘Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans’, Peter Schweizer, the journalist and investigator behind ‘Clinton Cash’, follows up on his work in ‘Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win’ to expose an entire network of corruption that is not only stealing America’s future, but has also claimed countless lives.

Blood Money is a war story illustrated with the Sun Tzu maxims that drive the larger strategic thinking of the Chinese military apparatus about how to “subdue the enemy without fighting”.

“According to a textbook given to Chinese military officers,” ‘Blood Money’ reveals, Xi is quoted as saying, “Our struggle and contest of power with the West cannot be moderated. It will inevitably be long, complex, and at times extremely sharp.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27601/chapter-9-norman-dodd-interview
Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

The philosophical rationalization and justification for Barack Obama’s shift to Outcome-Based Education (OBE) was presented by John W. Gardner in the 1950s. Gardner served concurrent tenures as president of both the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) and the Carnegie Corporation[i] in the mid-1950s.

In 1961 Gardner published Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? The book is a reflection on American excellence that debates the relative merits of focusing on equality and focusing on excellence, and asks if it is possible for society to do both.

Our Founding Fathers advocated meritocracy, a system based on ability, achievement, and equal opportunity. They understood that equality of opportunity achieves excellence. Gardner examines an alternative theory that focuses on equality of outcome, also known as equity, and argues that the goals of excellence and equity are not incompatible.

In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Gardner secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. His appointment institutionalized America’s move away from meritocracy, establishing the collaboration of government in the weaponization of American education for political purposes. Meritocracy was replaced with equity as the foundation of American education, and equal outcome became the educational objective. What was the political purpose of this fundamental change?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/a-conservative-liberal

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, by Jennifer Burns (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 592 pp., $27.73)

Jennifer Burns’s biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, will be the standard reference for anyone wanting to dive deeply into the life of the great economist and the world in which he flourished. The historical context that Burns provides makes the book almost as much a work of post-1929 economic and intellectual history as a biography of the bespectacled, diminutive professor who so influenced it. Though Burns is not uncritical of her subject, the story she tells will leave most right-leaning readers longing for the days when Friedman was one of their champions.

Before going back to Friedman’s youth in Rahway, New Jersey, and his time at Rutgers University, Burns introduces him at his apex, as economist extraordinaire and public intellectual. She notes that Friedman did more than lead the charge against Keynesianism; he “offered a philosophy of freedom that made a tremendous political impact in a liberty-loving country.” One of Burns’s goals is to “restore the fullness of Friedman’s thought to his public image” and to “approach Friedman as a scholar . . . setting his ideas in context and making his achievements legible for a new generation, either friend or foe.”

She touches all the key points of Friedman’s life, including his time at the University of Chicago as student and professor; the key influences on his thinking; his period away from academia in Washington and New York; his scholarship and leadership of the Chicago School of Economics, especially its “monetarism” and challenge to Keynesian orthodoxy; his work on the consumption function and the permanent income hypothesis, monetary history, the Phillips Curve, and the negative income tax; the controversy over his work in Chile and his relationship with Augusto Pinochet’s regime; his scuffles with mentor Arthur Burns; and the influence of his ideas on the late twentieth century and beyond. Reflecting on Friedman’s long shadow, Burns concludes that by century’s end, “the basics of monetarism had been adopted into conventional wisdom” and that “many of the things he had pressed for throughout his professional life had come to pass.”

https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-shocked-me-about-the-culture

There were many surreal aspects of my experience at Yale, including the opportunity to learn from high-profile professors. I took a course on Shakespeare taught by the late Harold Bloom, who has been described as “the most renowned, and arguably the most passionate, literary critic and Shakespeare scholar in America.” When I told him about my life, the 87-year-old professor gently replied, “You were forged in a fire.” I also met the psychology professor Albert Bandura—who at the time was 91 years old and died in 2021—to chat about a book he had recently written. I was surprised at how late in life many professors worked—some well into their eighties and even nineties. This was a notable difference from the aging adults I knew in my adoptive hometown of Red Bluff, Northern California, who typically looked forward to retirement and preferred not to work longer than they had to, unless it was out of financial necessity.

Before my first classes were scheduled to begin, I was sitting in the courtyard of my residential college when a young woman asked for help lifting some boxes into her dorm room. She introduced herself and told me she was a senior. I explained that this was my first semester.

“What do you think of Yale so far?” she asked.

I was embarrassed to answer. “I keep waiting for them to tell me it was a mistake that they let me in,” I said, carrying boxes up the stairs as she guided me. “Walking around, it feels like I’m dreaming.”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=bruce+d.+abramson+american+spirit+or+great+awokening&i=stripbooks&crid=3DD7VMMKA8IET&sprefix=bruce+d.+abramson+american+spirit+or+great+awokening%2Cstripbooks%2C253&ref=nb_sb_noss

Two years ago, I sat down to write a column about Wokeism as a religion. I figured that it would run longer than 800 words—likely into the 2500/3000 word range.

The material kept flowing. I shared much of it with my loyal Substack readers. (Thanks!). Then I pulled it together in book form:

American Spirit or Great Awokening?  The Battle to Restore or Destroy Our Nation (Academica Press, 2024). 

It’s a relatively short book (~50K words) and intended for a general (i.e., non-scholarly) audience. 

My basic argument is straightforward:

America is suffering from a spiritual crisis, which is the root cause of our polarized politics & culture.

Wokeism is a brilliant, new, utopian religion that has arisen to meet the unspoken and often denied spiritual needs of America’s most spiritually starved people, namely our elite.

If we wish to save the country, we’re going to have to get back in touch with America’s own spiritual roots and re-inject faith and community into our culture.

I’m eager for help with reviews & publicity.  If you’ve got any clout with folks who tell other folks what to read, please help me get in touch with them. In the meantime, please buy the book, read it, enjoy it, and recommend it!

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27557/chapter-6-an-unaware-and-compliant-citizenry

goudsmit.pundicity.com   lindagoudsmit.com 

We have discussed the weaponization of education in American schools and its sinister political objective to eliminate high literacy, individual agency, and independent intelligence. Dr. Dennis Cuddy, historian and political analyst, wrote an extraordinary article published on NewsWithViews, April 26, 2021, “An Unaware and Compliant Citizenry.”[i]

Cuddy documents the seismic shift in public education’s mission, from teaching basic skills and foundational knowledge to teachers acting as agents of social change and teaching political activism. The following are excerpts from the article:

The Clintons’ and others’ efforts to “produce an unaware and compliant citizenry” began with the National Education Association (NEA), whose President Catherine Barrett wrote in the February 10, 1973 edition of SATURDAY REVIEW OF EDUCATION:

“Dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling…. We will need to recognize that the so-called ‘basic skills,’ which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one-quarter of the present school day…. When this happens—and it’s near—the teacher can rise to his true calling. More than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher…. We will be agents of change.”

Via values clarification techniques, the values of students were to be changed to situation ethics…. In the 1980s, Hillary Clinton along with David Rockefeller, Jr. and others became Board members of Carnegie’s National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), with Mario Cuomo chairman and N.C. Governor Jim Hunt vice-chairman. The president of the NCEE was Marc Tucker, who right after Bill Clinton won the presidency in November 1992 wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton saying this would give them a chance to implement their “cradle-to-grave” plan for all Americans.

The following year, at the July 2–5, 1993 NEA’s national convention, President Clinton addressed the delegates and thanked the NEA for “the gift of our assistant secretary,” referring to long-time NEA activist Sharon Robinson, who became U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Education Research and Improvement (OERI, where I had worked in the Reagan administration). President Clinton went on to say that he believed his goals for America closely parallel those of the NEA, further stating: “And I believe that the president of this organization would say we have had the partnership I promised in the campaign of 1992, and we will continue to have it…. You and I are joined in a common cause, and I believe we will succeed.” On December 15, 1993, EDUCATION WEEK reported that “Debra DeLee, the former director of governmental relations for the NEA, has joined the Democratic National Committee as its executive director.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/coleman-hughes-on-the-new-racism?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

My book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, is about our turning away from a central idea that animated the work of the great civil rights leaders of the twentieth century: color blindness. The principle of color blindness does not mean that we pretend we don’t recognize race. The definition I espouse is that we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and in our private lives. 

But our society keeps failing to enshrine color blindness as its guiding ethos. It is this ongoing failure that has allowed state-sanctioned racism to emerge again and again in new and different forms—most recently through the movement I call neoracism. 

Neoracists and white supremacists are both committed to different flavors of race supremacy. They both deny our common humanity. They both deny that all races are created equal. They both agree that some races are superior to others, and they both agree that not all people deserve to be treated equally in society. The animating feeling behind neoracism is that people of color are morally superior to white people—that people of color are better at being good people. That’s at the core. The truth, which should be obvious, is that no race is morally superior to any other. 

Martin Luther King never wavered on the importance of our common humanity and the goal of transcending race. Nor did he waver on his preference for class-based policy over race-based policy. 

Today’s neoracists sound nothing like Dr. King yet they claim his mantle. They enjoy the moral authority of being seen as the carriers of his legacy while simultaneously betraying the very ideals that he stood for. It is the rise of this race consciousness that’s turned elite American institutions into neoracist strongholds. 

I will lay out here some of the reasons I think neoracism is a detrimental ideology that undermines social progress and that harms black people in specific ways. First, I will illustrate this with a story about my paternal grandfather. 

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27547/chapter-5-america-requires-an-educational

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts in order to form a judgment. It is the foundation of rational thought. Critical thinking depends upon accurate information, otherwise known as facts, and therefore relies upon objective reality. The ability to remain in objective reality is threatened when disinformation, misinformation, fiction, and fantasy (all forms of subjective reality) are presented as fact. It is impossible to make an informed decision without an accurate source of information.

Reading is the essential foundational skill individual citizens use to access information and make informed decisions. Together, reading, writing, and arithmetic are the communication tools that equip children with agency. Understanding the psychological concept of agency is extremely important to our discussion. Encyclopedia.com[i]defines and discusses agency:

The concept of agency as a psychological dimension refers to the process of behaving with intentionality. Human beings exercise agency when they intentionally influence their own functioning, environments, life circumstances, and destiny. To posit that human beings have agency is to contend that they are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting rather than reactively shaped by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses.

Reading provides agency for learning because textbooks, including math and science textbooks, require the ability to read. Reading provides a sense of independence, accomplishment, and self-sufficiency. Competence is the mother of self-esteem, and learning to read is a seismic shift in a child’s perception of self. The child begins to feel his or her power. Encyclopedia.com continues:

To exercise human agency, people must believe in their capability to attain given ends. These self-efficacy beliefs are the foundation of human motivation, well-being, and accomplishment. Whatever other factors serve as guides and motivators, they are rooted in the core belief that one has the power to effect changes by one’s actions, that one’s locus of control is internal rather than external. This is because unless people believe that their actions can produce the outcomes they desire, they have little incentive to act or to persevere in the face of difficulties.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-troubled-by-rob-henderson

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, by Rob Henderson (Gallery Books, 336 pp., $26.09)

In Rob Henderson’s first recounted memory in his new memoir, Troubled, he is three years old, screaming in terror and clinging to his mother as two policemen wrestle handcuffs onto her wrists. He had no idea why this was happening, of course; the scuffle likely had something to do with his mother’s incorrigible drug addiction. A Korean-born college dropout, she relied on prostitution to support her habit. When she and Rob weren’t living in a car, she would tie him to a chair in the apartment to attend to her customers. Her other two boys, Rob’s brothers, had different fathers; Rob would never know them or learn what became of them. He has no pictures, no letters, no trinkets—not a scrap to give substance to the phantom family he knows only through a few official documents and unverifiable rumors.

Hard-knocks orphan sagas are common in world literature, but Henderson’s story is extraordinary—and not because of cruelty, loss, truancy, and addiction, though there is plenty of that. It’s not extraordinary because of an uplifting story of triumph over adversity, though Troubled is a particularly impressive example of that, too; now in his early thirties, Henderson has an undergraduate degree from Yale and a Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge. No, Troubled is extraordinary because of its author’s ability to mine both the grief of his childhood and the challenges of his rise into an elite world.

After Henderson was taken from his mother, the only constant in his young life was Gerri, a social worker who every few weeks would appear at one of the seven foster homes through which he cycled. She often would show up without warning to take him to a new home, hauling a garbage bag to pack his few possessions.