RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Children are easily controlled because they live in a world of feelings, subjective reality. They have not developed the critical-thinking skills required to survive in the adult world of objective reality.

In a society of ordered liberty, stealing is a crime regardless of who the thief is. Stealing is the WHAT of the crime, the thief is the WHO. Blind justice evaluates behavior according to WHAT is being done, not WHO is doing it, ensuring that no one is above the law. When blindfolds come off and tribal norms of identity politics take over, freedom is the casualty. Blind justice is foundational in a constitutional republic specifically because it evaluates the WHAT of behavior, not the WHO being charged with a crime.

This is an extremely important distinction for two reasons. First, it is a dramatic departure from the binary sociopolitical infrastructure of rulers and ruled. Binary sociopolitical systems support a two-tiered system of justice, one for the rulers and one for the ruled. In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the goal is one system of justice for all.

Second, distinguishing between the WHAT and the WHO separates childish feelings, which focus on the WHO, from adult, rational thinking that focuses on the WHAT. Children view authority figures through the unquestioning, trustful eyes of dependence. 

If a society can be pressured to remain in eternal childhood, its citizens do not psychologically develop past the WHO of behavior. They remain stalled in the emotional world of childhood, accepting what they are told, because they never developed the critical-thinking skills needed to question the WHAT of information. A regressed society is the unaware, compliant population made famous by the leaked emails of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27515/chapter-3-birdman-and-the-reality-revolution

The ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is an essential survival skill. If a man believes he can fly and jumps off a twenty-story ledge, he falls to his death because gravity is a fact, an objective truth. Birdman’s fantasy, a subjective reality, cannot compete with the objective reality of gravity.

Let’s break down the process of thinking and doing. Thinking is a private matter and human beings are free to think their thoughts at any time in any place. Birdman is free to think he can fly, without consequence to himself or others. It is the moment he steps off the ledge that his subjective reality collides with objective reality.

Adults and children are evaluated differently in society. The fantasies of children are an accepted part of the growth process. In a sane society, adults who are out of touch with reality are deemed insane. In our example, Birdman would be considered insane.

Civil society and the laws that govern it are based on the acceptance of objective reality by its citizens. What would happen if there was a movement that deliberately rejected the teaching of objective reality and taught subjective reality instead? What would be the purpose of driving a society insane?

Remember, the ability to distinguish between fact and fantasy is a survival skill, because thought precedes action. Birdman thought he could fly and jumped to his death. Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts in order to form a judgment, and is the foundation of rational thought. 

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27496/chapter-2-the-art-of-psychological-warfare

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. 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 psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children.

Parents must adopt a wartime mentality in order to understand and challenge the dangerous government policies affecting their children. Globalist strategists based their tactical and operational plans for their War on America on Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The differences between Sun Tzu’s strategies of the 6th century BC and 21st-century globalist psychological/informational warfare are the advances in science and technology available for implementing the weapons of mass social engineering and mass psychological destruction today.

Modern psychological warfare (PSYWAR) and psychological operations (PSYOPS) utilize the 21st-century digital environment and its integrated communications landscape to communicate and coordinate censorship, disinformation, and misinformation. The hearts and minds of unsuspecting viewers are being manipulated with websites, cloud servers, search engines, social media outlets, mobile apps, audio, video, podcasts, webinars, and even immersive digital environments using artificial, interactive, computer-generated scenes. Information wars are 21st-century propaganda wars, foundational to PSYWAR and PSYOPS because the information presented is socially engineered to produce a desired political effect.

Loss and grief are equal opportunity predators. Two friends have written books which resonate with all who have mourned a loss of beloved parents, spouses, children and dear friends. “Everything is a Little Broken” is a poignant novel by Rebecca Sugar about the sorrow, and even humor when confronted by a father’s crumbling health. Warren Kozak’s “Waving Goodby” is about losing his lovely and loving wife after a grim diagnosis, extraordinary efforts to cure her and reinventing his life alone. Both will be available in February and April respectively. rsk

Waving Goodbye: Life After Loss

by Warren Kozak

To those around me—my friends, my colleagues, even my daughter—I appear normal, but in one very fundamental way, I am not.

The old me left with my wife. I’m not sure who this new person is—I am still evolving. But I will tell you this with absolute certainty: I am not the same person I was before my wife died on January 1, 2018.

For anyone struggling with the loss of a spouse—anyone whose world has been turned upside down in a way they’ve never encountered before—here is something that could help. Waving Goodbye is a candid, honest, and approachable guide to dealing with the death of a spouse written by a very ordinary guy who has lived through the ordeal.

Warren Kozak doesn’t just tell you that time heals all wounds; he explains how the passage of time actually helped. Despite the shattering heartbreak and insurmountable grief, Kozak shares what worked, what didn’t, and the insights he learned along the way to help anyone who has suffered this kind of loss.

Everything Is a Little Broken Paperback – February 27, 2024

by Rebecca Sugar

Aging is hard, but watching those you love get older isn’t much easier.

What do you do when the people you love are declining right in front of your eyes? What can you do but rage at all that is cruel, laugh at all that is absurd, and show up for whatever happens next?

Mira Cayne’s father has been in physical decline for decades, ever since his spinal cord injury at the age of forty-four. He was never the dad who ran a marathon, but he was the strongest and most resilient man Mira knew. Now, at seventy-nine, Matt Frank is recovering from his second surgery, and Mira can see a change in him. The compounding effects of old age and his infirmity are taking a toll on his fighting spirit, and Mira is trying to be strong for them both. She isn’t sure she is up to the task.

As Matt heals, his fragile condition produces daily indignities that offer the father and daughter a choice: to laugh or to cry. Luckily for Mira, she is built just like her father, and there is no doubt which choice they will make.