RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Unlike other soldiers who returned home from World War II, my father did speak of his experiences – at least some of them, and to me, his oldest son. I remember his admonishment – we should never forget what the Nazis did to the Jewish people over the dozen years they held power. And I never have.

Re-reading Elie Wiesel’s book every few years is a worthy habit. In the 2006 edition, translated by his wife Marion, he wrote in the introduction: “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was. Others will never know.” He is right. Those who grew up like me in the 1940s and ‘50s, in comfortable post-War America amid loving families, and with only the distant, vague threat of the bomb, can never understand the fear of those threatened with abandonment, imprisonment, torture, and death by the Third Reich.

Yet, as I read this book for the third or fourth time, I found myself thinking in broader terms – beyond just Europe, the Jewish people, and Nazis. While true goodness is rare, evil is ubiquitous across all classes, races, religions, and nationalities. It comes in all sizes, shapes, and colors. It infects individuals. But it is political/universal evil that concerns this essay. The human capacity to inflict harm is global. It knows no borders. Consider: Approximately forty percent of the ten to fifteen million Africans sold into slavery in the Americas between 1500 and 1900 died, either in Africa or aboard ships. Many of the survivors died in captivity. It is estimated that up to twelve million indigenous people were killed between 1492 and 1900, in South, Central, and North America.

Things were worse in the 20th Century. The Nazis killed an estimated sixteen million soldiers and civilians. An estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed by Turks between 1915 and 1923. Approximately ten million Russians were killed between 1917 and 1923, during their revolution. Between six and twenty million Russians and others were killed by Stalin, including about four and a half million Ukrainians during the Holodomor (1932-1933). Forty percent of U.S. prisoners held in Japanese POW camps are estimated to have died. Estimates are that up two million Muslims and Hindus were killed in post-independence India.  It is estimated that between forty and eighty million Chinese were killed by Mao Zedong, including the famine (1959-1961) and the cultural revolution (1966-1976). Between 1975 and 1979, the Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, led by communist dictator Pol Pot, killed between one and a half million and three million of their seven million population. Today, Iran supports Muslim terrorists around the world, and sub-Saharan African Islamists kill about twenty-five thousand Christians every year. Man’s capacity for evil is untold.

https://quillette.com/2023/08/22/a-dream-deferred-revisited/
But race is not a good proxy for human suffering in America. None of us can answer for the suffering of our history. It’s enough to simply be mindful of the suffering of the present or of our own suffering or of the person right in front of us. Suffering is felt on a human level beneath the skin and that is where our care and concern ought to lie. It is time to walk away from our past into the vast and frightening future for which none of us is prepared.

“The second book you publish,” Shelby Steele’s editor once told him, “is the hardest one you will ever write.” In Steele’s case, it turned out to be his best. After the publication of The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America in 1990, Steele found himself in the intellectual spotlight on the most contentious issue in the country. That experience changed his life. “Ultimately, what I found after The Content of Our Character is that people wanted more, wanted me to go further,” he told me earlier this year. “So that became the struggle. I had to go deeper to get to material and get my own thinking onto a different phase.”

The success and attention Steele received, however, came at a steep price. He was ejected from academia after a 20-year tenure at San José State University as an English professor, and he became a pariah to the post-1990s civil-rights establishment. He lost a number of friends and found that his university lectures were now routinely shouted down by students. “My career in universities sort of ended at that point, involuntarily,” he recalls. “The campus I taught on for many years sort of canceled me. I brag today [that] I was one of the first canceled people.” These unwelcome developments resulted in his second book, A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, in 1998—an extended reflection on his new role as a black conservative in America’s cultural landscape, and on the country’s racial iconography and moral psychology. “So, all these things I had to absorb and understand. It was a difficult, alienating period of my life that now, in retrospect, I’m grateful for.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/french-fry-leadership/

Bruno Hilgart began his management career as a 16-year-old hourly team member at a major QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) Brand in 1981. After graduating high school in 1983, he was promoted into his first management position just after his 18th birthday and became the General Manager of his first location as a 20-year-old in January 1986. He spent the next 26 years growing along with the company and in January 1996 was promoted to be the face of the franchise, serving in the role of leading the company as Director of Operations and Marketing until March of 2012.

I recently interviewed him about his recent book, French Fry Leadership: How to Attain Profits Through Serving People.

Hill: Bruno, your new book is a very well-written one that explains, in short chapters, definitive steps to achieve profits by adhering to a leadership philosophy you’ve developed after over 35 years in the restaurant business. But your story is an interesting one. You never went to college, and you were a restaurant manager by the time you were 20. Where did that confidence to be a leader so young in life come from?

Hilgart: My confidence to be a leader at such a young age came from the work ethic I was taught by my parents and knowing at a young age that if I wanted anything in life I was going to have to earn it. My family did not have much money, so I got a paper route at 12 years old. My work ethic was noticed by my customers by the feedback and the tips I received. This built my confidence. As a 14-year-old busboy, my boss and the servers noticed my work by giving me more hours and sharing more tips with me than the other busboys. I also had success playing baseball and basketball and was an overall natural athlete who loved to compete. The environment and culture at the first Burger King restaurant that I began working at while a junior in high school also recognized my work, which led to them trusting me with additional responsibilities at a young age. The owner was a college athlete, so we meshed well there, too.

Hill: You challenge and debunk a lot of popular business myths out there. One is that people do not quit their jobs—rather, they quit their bosses. Is this really the case, even if they have a desire to self-actualize beyond the scope of their current employment?

https://www.jns.org/jns/george-soros/23/8/21/312008/

Conservatives have long warned against George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire famous for pouring money into left-wing causes, but Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “The Soros Agenda,” was one of the first to speak out about what she describes as the subversive threat Soros poses to America and the West.

Ehrenfeld first became aware of Soros’s plans in the 1990s due to her research on drug addiction and drug trafficking (Soros’s first foray into American public policy was drug legalization). “I knew that drug legalization would cause a massive increase in the number of drug addicts,” writes Ehrenfeld.

“Moreover, I recalled that enabling easy access to narcotics was mentioned in the ‘Soviet Military Encyclopedia’ as an important weapon during so-called peacetime. It was recommended because when easily accessible, narcotic use spreads like fire, undermining the targeted country’s society, economy, and political integrity,” she continues.

In February 1995, as result of her expertise on drug issues, Ehrenfeld found herself invited to a dinner at Soros’s home in New York City. He posed as open-minded and prepared to debate the drug issue, so she decided to correct him when he praised the Swiss. (Ehrenfeld had just returned from Switzerland, where she met with experts involved in a government-sponsored project to supply addicts with heroin, morphine and free needles—an experiment which proved a disaster.)

“[P]olitely, I interrupted Soros, pointing out he was ill-informed. He seemed stunned that I dared contradict him and forcefully repeated his praise of the Swiss. When I insisted he was wrong, the angry Soros turned around and left the big living room. The other guests, who until then stood around us, listening, moved very fast away from me. The scene reminded me of something Woody Allen would have created,” she writes.

Ehrenfeld recognized that Soros was determined to change America’s drug policy. In a Feb. 7, 1996 Wall Street Journal op-ed, she cautioned that Soros’s “sponsorship unified the movement to legalize drugs and gave it the respectability and credibility it lacked.” She also warned that if Soros went unchallenged, he would alter the political landscape in America. She even visited senators and Republican mega-donors to tell them Soros must be countered. Nobody took action, she said.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“…it is neither humanitarian nor Democratic nor American to indoctrinate the people of the United States with the idea that it is the duty of the government to support the citizen, rather than the duty of the citizen to support the government.”

Speech by John W. Davis, October 21, 1936 Democrat Presidential candidate 1924

Davis’ words in 1936 anticipated the penultimate sentence in President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address twenty-five years later: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

Davis’s and Kennedy’s words expressed a longing for a time when government was limited and the individual paramount, when Horatio Alger was honored, and when children were told success was up to them, that they could become whatever they wanted, as long as they were aspirant, focused, and diligent.

While the immediate aim of the policies and agencies created by FDR’s New Deal was to alleviate the suffering brought on by the Depression, the long-term consequence was to empower the State at the cost of personal freedom and choice. The result was the birth of the “nanny” State, where government is viewed as overprotective and interferes unduly with individual choice. Kennedy’s call in 1961 was for greater individual self-reliance. But his words went unheeded; LBJ’s “Great Society” boosted the role of government, offering more entitlements. The 1980s and ‘90s provided a respite in the rate of change, but the momentum toward bigger government persisted. Progressive candidate Barack Obama spoke in late October 2008: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Just as the stock market crash of 1929, provided the impetus for a more heavy-handed government response, the credit crisis of 2008 gave Mr. Obama the same excuse. As Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s future White House Chief of Staff, exclaimed after the election: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

When Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 3, 1933, the country was in the depths of the Great Depression. While the Dow Jones Industrial Averages were 30% higher than the summer of 1932, they were down 85% from their peak in 1929. Unemployment was close to 25% and real GDP was 26% lower than four years earlier. The Country was looking for a savior, and FDR appeared.

Once inaugurated in March 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took dramatic action. He declared a bank holiday, which shut down banks and the New York Stock Exchange for a week. In the interim, Congress passed a series of measures to ensure the integrity of the banks, including deposit insurance. When banks re-opened the immediate crisis passed. People re-deposited funds they had withdrawn, and the stock market opened higher. Over the next few years (like his successor seventy-six later with his “pen and phone”) FDR amassed power. In doing so, he created a plethora of agencies – “alphabet agencies,” as they were known. Among them: AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration), CCC (Civil Conservation Corporation), ERA (Emergency Relief Act), FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), NRA (National Recovery Act), PWA (Public Works Administration), REA (Rural Electrification Administration, TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), and the WPA (Works Progress Administration) – all reporting to the Executive.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-woke-revolution-happened/

The story has been told many times over the years. There are, indeed, many ways to tell it, although a passage from the beginning of Roger Kimball’s 2000 book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America can serve as a more than suitable summary of all of them:

 In the Sixties and Seventies, after fantasies of overt political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to undertake “the long march through the institutions.”…In the context of Western societies, [this] signified – in the words of Herbert Marcuse – “working against the established institutions while working within them.” It was primarily by this means – by insinuation and infiltration rather than confrontation – that the countercultural dreams of radicals like Marcuse have triumphed.

For what it’s worth, the phrase “long march through the institutions” – a reference to the long march of Mao’s army in 1934 in retreat from the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek – has been attributed by some to the German socialist Rudi Dutschke (1940-79) and by others to the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937).

In any event, in recounting the American left’s long march, who or what should be foregrounded? No two writers have exactly the same answer. Kimball, for his part, chose to focus on a range of individuals and institutions, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, the “Beat Generation” writers, Timothy Leary, and The New York Review of Books. Two decades later, in a 2000 book that was also entitled The Long March, the British writer Marc Sidwell traced the gradual countercultural subversion of the West back to Gramsci before delving into the roles played in that process by György Lukács, E. P. Thompson, and Marcuse in that process. James Lindsay, whose 2022 book The Marxification of Education limits its purview largely to the subversion of the academy, puts the Brazilian socialist Paulo Freire (1921-97) at the heart of the story; and my own 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution, which also confines itself to the leftist takeover of higher education, splits the responsibility for that dire development among Gramsci, Freire, and the Afro-Caribbean Marxist Frantz Fanon (1925-69).

Christopher Rufo’s incisive new book America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything covers essentially the same territory as Kimball’s and Sidwell’s books while giving attention, along the way, to the events reported by Lindsay and me. Rufo, now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a remarkable young man (he turns 39 on August 26) who increasingly needs no introduction: during the last few years, he’s become a leading voice in the struggle against the mainstreaming at American schools and colleges of critical race theory (CRT), transgender ideology, and the tyranny of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In addition to writing extensively on these topics (notably at City Journal), he’s been impressively active on the barricades, leading the effort to have CRT banned from public schools in no fewer than 22 states, inspiring President Trump to ban CRT “training” in the federal government, and rolling back radicalism at New College in Florida, at which Governor Ron DeSantis named him a trustee. The progressive reaction to his activities is summed up in the fatuous headline of a 2021 New Yorker hit job: “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict over Critical Race Theory.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/obamas-self-made-myths-still-stand/

The media deification of Barack Obama has really never ended. His election to the presidency in 2008 was treated as a milestone, like man landing on the moon. Allegedly objective journalists lined up in every studio and on every front page to do him homage.

It wasn’t journalism. It was more like idolatry. It was like Bryant Gumbel harshly replying in 1989 to new information about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s adultery. He said, “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”

This line came to mind in reading a recent Tablet magazine interview with liberal historian David Garrow, a King specialist. Garrow’s massive 2017 tome on Obama, “Rising Star,” was blasted by New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani. She argued his epilogue was like a “Republican attack ad.” This is comical, since Garrow’s epilogue recounted quotes from, among others, liberals at the Times and The Washington Post.

David Samuels — who penned an unforgettable piece for The New York Times Magazine revealing that Obama aide Ben Rhodes boasted of creating an “echo chamber” for Obama’s foreign policy in the press — focused Garrow on a woman named Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who Obama asked to marry him twice.

Samuels is amazed at how no one before Garrow really put Jager into focus. That includes David Maraniss, whose 2012 Obama book preceded Garrow in ruling that Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father” was largely fictional, especially Obama turning his girlfriends into a composite white character. He didn’t put Jager in the index. (Jager is half-Dutch, half-Japanese.)

This is the obvious Samuels pull quote: “The idea that the celebrated journalists who wrote popular biographies of Obama and became enthusiastic members of his personal claque couldn’t locate Jager — or never knew who she was — defies belief. It seems more likely that the character Obama fashioned in ‘Dreams’ had been defined — by Obama — as being beyond the reach of normal reportorial scrutiny.”

Samuels suggests Garrow’s book was scorned because it highlighted “a remarkable lack of curiosity” about a man who was “treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.” It underlined that as Obama decided he wanted to be president one day, he realized having a white wife would be an obstacle.