RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.)

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27668/chapter-12-seeding-race-wars

 lindagoudsmit.com goudsmit.pundicity.com 

James Lindsay’s analysis of Woke Marxism (Chapter 11) is supported by the extraordinary Testimony of Dr. Bella Dodd to HUAC in 1953.[i] The U.S. House of Representatives formed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 to look into subversive activity by private citizens. Bella Dodd (1904–1969) was a New York teacher, lawyer, labor union activist, and high-ranking member of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 1940s. She speaks candidly about her idealism; her seduction into the Communist Party as a young woman; and her growing disillusionment, disaffection, and final ardent anti-communist stance.

Bella Dodd testifies with an experienced insider’s voice, exposing the fundamental deceit of communism in her very personal and powerful sworn statement. She explains how millions of Americans, herself included, were sucked into communism with slogans and generalizations—seduced by feelings, not facts. Excerpts from her testimony are particularly relevant today:

Take, for instance, the whole question of antifascism. The Communist Party in this country set itself up as the one organization that was fighting fascism. Very few other organizations gave them a battle for that, and so the Americans got to feeling, “These are the anti-Fascists.”

We only learn now, after reading documents captured by the American soldiers in Germany, that throughout the time the Communists were calling themselves “anti-Fascists,” they were working with the German high brass while Hitler was in power…. Well, they took the anti-Fascist slogan and made themselves the protagonists of antifascism.

They did the same thing with the word “democracy.” It became very difficult to oppose them because they posed everything in terms of the word “democracy.” … (pp. 1746–1747)

They divide your loyalty to the “country” from loyalty to the “people.” They say, “We are the greatest Americans there are. We believe in supporting the people.”

Who are the people? They are for the class society—for the proletariat. They say, “The working class makes up 98 percent of the people. Therefore, we, in our desire to protect the people, are the greatest democrats that there are.” But they forget to tell you that as far as they are concerned, before they are through taking power, they will kill off large sections of the working class if it doesn’t go along with their program…. (p. 1748)

—#1 New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most respected legal scholars—explains why the horrific attack of Oct 7 and Israel’s just response changes everything. 

It has changed the relationship between Israel and the United States, especially with regard to the possibility of direct American intervention. 
It has required Israel to consider its nuclear option as a last resort to assure its survival. 
It has revealed dangerous attitudes among America’s future leaders on today’s college campuses toward Israel’s possible destruction.
It has exposed media biases that have been exacerbated with Israel’s vulnerabilities. 
It has united Israelis and Jews around the world as never before, despite the deep divisions among them politically, religiously, and ideologically.  Nothing will ever be the same. 
It has clouded the future of peace between Israel and its Arab and Muslim neighbors and has diminished the proposals for a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
It has made predictions about the future of the region nearly impossible, except that imposing instability is inevitable.

In this short book, Dershowitz analyzes these transforming events and suggests how to move forward.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-smartphone-based-childhood-works-against-making-children-resilient

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin Random House, 400 pp., $30)

In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” parents have surrendered to bad ideas and practices that foster a culture of emotional fragility, with its calls for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and censorship.

Haidt’s new book, The Anxious Generation, is a thematic extension of this argument. It describes how Gen Z—those born after 1995, the first “to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets”—has been made fragile by the transition from a play-based to a smartphone-based childhood. The virtual environment of social media, Haidt contends, amplifies extreme ideas and worsens cognitive distortions, swelling this cohort’s rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm.

Haidt chronicles how the shift to a phone-based childhood affects learning. It deprives children of experiences that make them productive participants in a democratic society. One reason that kids play is to practice adult skills like independently resolving conflicts. Virtual environments don’t offer this practice—kids can just log off or leave a chat to avoid disputes—while crowding out time spent on real-world activities that do. Unsupervised physical play, with opportunity for low-cost mistakes and even some criticism and teasing, are crucial for learning interpersonal skills and building resilience.

Ironically, while we overemphasize protecting children from the slightest physical or emotional harm in the real world, the virtual world has greater potential for danger. In this realm, parents can’t reward kids with increasing levels of responsibility and independence as they get older. Age does not exist online; little more is needed than, say, checking a box without verification to access a webpage meant for those over 18.

Social media exploits our natural sensitivity to others’ opinions and actions. Haidt describes how evolutionary pressures have rewarded those who learn to conform and who pick the right people to copy. Millions of followers or likes on a post tell young people what they should do to fit in. Social media’s architecture is designed to make the most extreme content go viral. It’s easy to see how constant exposure to the pseudo-norms of a virtual environment, whether radical political ideas or unattainable standards of wealth, beauty, and success, can lead to sustained negative feelings.

The virality of social media presents other dangers. A social miscalculation among a few kids on the playground can help children calibrate their behavior; the same mistake on the Internet can result in thousands—or even millions—of harassing comments and will live online forever.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27641/chapter-11-critical-race-theory-a-species-of

 goudsmit.pundicity.com 

 lindagoudsmit.com 

Dr. James Lindsay, mathematician, cultural critic, political analyst, and prolific anti-Woke/anti-Marxist writer, presents an extraordinary and original analysis of the existential threat facing Western Civilization. He introduces Marxism as a genus of ideological thought, and categorizes classical economic Marxism, Maoism, radical feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and Woke as species in the genus of Marxism. It is a magnificent discourse that identifies Woke as the 21st-century species of Marxism evolved to attack the West, signaling our entry into the transformational stage of education, the final phase of Outcome-Based Education (OBE), discussed in Chapter 6.

Lindsay addressed the European Parliament at its Woke Conference on March 29, 2023[i]. It is a stunning speech in which he states unequivocally, “Woke is Maoism with Western characteristics.” The complete transcript follows.

[Transcript]

Woke: A Culture War Against Europe | James Lindsay at the European Parliament

March 29, 2023 [posted May 30, 2023]

Hello. Thank you. I’m glad to be here. I want to address something Tom just said, which is, in fact, that woke is supposed to advance equity in Europe. So, here’s the definition of equity and see if it sounds like a definition of anything else you’ve ever heard of.

The definition of equity comes from the public administration literature. It was written by a man named George Frederickson, and the definition is “an administered political economy in which Shares are adjusted so that citizens are made equal.”

Does that sound like anything you’ve heard of before—like socialism? They’re going to administer an economy to make “shares” equal. The only difference between equity and socialism is the type of property that they redistribute—the type of shares. They’re going to redistribute social and cultural capital, in addition to economic and material capital.

And so, this is my thesis: When we say, “What is woke?” Woke is Maoism with American characteristics.

A New York Times–bestselling historian charts how and why societies from ancient Greece to the modern era chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time

War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. Modern societies are not immune from the horror of a war of extinction.

In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.