RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

From the author of Irreversible Damage, an investigation into a mental health industry that is harming, not healing, American children

In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?

In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Among her unsettling findings:

Talk therapy can induce rumination, trapping children in cycles of anxiety and depression
Social Emotional Learning handicaps our most vulnerable children, in both public schools and private
“Gentle parenting” can encourage emotional turbulence – even violence – in children as they lash out, desperate for an adult in charge

Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease. Bad Therapy is a must-read for anyone questioning why our efforts to bolster America’s kids have backfired—and what it will take for parents to lead a turnaround.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27618/chapter-10-objective-reality-is-required-for

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  lindagoudsmit.com 

The globalist War on America, documented in the Dodd Report, is a culture war fought without bullets that has targeted America’s children for over 100 years. The classroom is the globalists’ chosen battlefield, because whoever controls the educational curriculum controls the future. Why is this true?

Because children live what they learn. Education is an industry, and like all industries, it produces a product. The goal of America’s enemies is to produce an unaware, compliant citizenry groomed for life in the planned globalist Unistate. The War on America’s Children utilizes both informational and psychological warfare to achieve that goal.

The globalist social engineers are skilled strategists applying subversive wartime psychological tactics to “change the hearts and minds” of American children. The strategic goals are to replace parental authority with governmental authority, and to move society from objective reality, the adult world of facts, to subjective reality, the childish world of feelings.

Interfering with a child’s developing ability to reality-test is a staggering deceit and a monstrous abuse of power. Education reformer Deborah DeGroff’s 2019 handbook Between the Covers: What’s Inside a Children’s Book?[i]exposes the deceit and documents the sad reality of illiteracy in America today.

In the past, when children were told that every student was a butterfly, the children knew it wasn’t true because they could see for themselves that some students were extremely smart and others weren’t–––no matter what the teacher said. At that time, children were still learning to read with phonics. It was a time before sight-words and whole-word instruction became ubiquitous, and well before “hi-lo” reading even existed.

I had never heard of hi-lo reading before reading Deborah DeGroff’s book. Basically, instead of teaching children to actually read, a deceitful system was developed to address and adapt to the alarmingly low reading levels across the country. Hi-lo is a reference to the fact that the book content is considered upper-grade (high school interest), but the actual reading level is lower grade—sometimes as low as second- or third-grade level!!

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!