RUTHFULLY YOURS

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“…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.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inside-tuckers-world/

During the last few years, the term TDS, meaning “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” has acquired a secondary meaning: “Tucker Derangement Syndrome.” Or, at least, it should have, because the leftist hostility directed at the longtime TV host comes close to rivaling that directed at the ex-president with whom he, more than anyone else on cable news, is so strongly identified. If Trump is the man who challenged the Beltway uniparty in the name of American liberty and government by the people, leading millions of voters to realize that a great many Republicans were as fully a part of the swamp as Democrats, Tucker Carlson is the man who took on the cable news media consensus, demonstrating that Fox News is, in many ways, less a real alternative to CNN and MSNBC than a controlled opposition, on whose airways only a certain degree of dissent from mainstream orthodoxy is permitted. If Trump’s betrayal by many GOP leaders – from Bob Barr to Mike Pence – opened the eyes of a great many of his supporters, Tucker’s expulsion from Fox News illuminated the grim reality that pretty much all of America’s corporate news organizations are, in the end, tainted tools of the cultural elite.

Tucker’s unexpected transformation from jewel in the Fox News crown to fully independent voice on Twitter – sorry, X – is the latest twist in a life story that Chadwick Moore, a former guest on Tucker’s show as well as on other Fox News programs (notably The Five), tells with verve and admiration in his estimable new biography, Tucker. If there were nothing else to praise about it, I would give Moore props for writing the first non-fiction book I’ve read in quite a while that doesn’t have a long, unnecessary subtitle. But, in fact, there’s a lot more to like here. Moore has figured out how to cover the bullet points about Tucker’s childhood and youth without loading us down, in the opening chapters, with details that we don’t really want or need to know. The bottom line, which Moore conveys vividly, is that Tucker, who I’ve always vaguely gathered was a scion of wealth, was in reality the son of Lisa, a spoiled rich San Francisco girl turned hippie (now deceased) who abandoned her husband and her two sons when the boys were little, and Dick, who began his life in a Massachusetts orphanage, raised his boys on his own, went on to be a TV news anchor in San Diego and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and is still going strong in his eighties.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/a_revealing_interview_reminds_us_what_a_bizarre_fake_person_obama_was_and_is.html

In 2017, David Garrow’s carefully researched Obama biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, appeared to much less fanfare than it deserved.  The media undoubtedly downplayed it because it offered the truth behind many of Obama’s self-adulatory inventions, and Trump’s new presidency occupied everyone’s energy.  What makes the book newsworthy today is that David Samuels has interviewed Garrow and revisited narratives in the book, reminding everyone of the scary, power-obsessed nastiness behind Obama’s carefully built façade.

The interview on Tablet is long and worth every second it takes you to read it.  However, I’ve summarized below some of the highlights.

In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his breakup with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a scholar known for her meticulous, honest research.  According to Obama, they broke up because after seeing a play by August Wilson, a black writer, Obama suddenly gained a black consciousness that Jager refused to recognize or understand.

However, Garrow, unlike other journalists in America, interviewed Jager for her side of the story.  It was quite different.

Image: Barack Obama. YouTube screen grab (cropped).

Jager said that they broke up because they went to see an exhibit about Adolf Eichman’s 1961 trial at the same time that Steve Cokely had accused Chicago’s Jewish doctors of giving black babies AIDS.  Jager, whose grandparents were honored as Righteous Gentiles for saving Jews during WWII, broke up with Obama because he refused to denounce anti-Semitism.  Considering Obama’s open hostility to Israel and later palling around with famous anti-Semites (e.g., Rev. Wright, Obama’s infamous and still hidden tape at a pro-PLO dinner, and Obama’s photo with Farrakhan), her version rings true.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/communist_tactics_and_martin_amiss_blindness.html

I recently read Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) which lays bare the enormity of the Stalinist legacy where more than 20 million people were murdered. It is deeply puzzling to read an author who documents the horror of the Left but who in 2016 also claimed that he “[was] Left of left.  Not very far left, but left, and [he] was that when [he] was 20, and [he’s] that now.”

Amis despised President Trump, whom he hated  and called a totalitarian.  But it was Trump who asserted “that America will never be a socialist country — ever.” And it is undeniable that socialism is the first step toward communism. In fact, it is Biden who seems the embodiment of all that Amis elaborated upon in his book. 

Let’s begin with attacks on religion.

In 1921 Lenin instructed a Red Army Commission to “give the most decisive and merciless battle to the [clergy] and subdue its resistance [.]”  (Amis 29).

Fast forward and repeatedly the Biden administration has nominated individuals to the highest levels of government who exhibit disdain for those they are charged to serve. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra “displays not just an unwillingness to protect the rights of conscience but an overt antagonism toward people of faith.” In addition, “Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and 19 GOP state attorneys general are demanding answers from the FBI and Justice Department and threatening legal action after a leaked internal FBI memo revealed that the agency had efforts underway to identify and treat Catholics as “potential terrorists.” 

America’s most effective conservative intellectual proves once and for all that Marxist radicals have taken over our nation’s institutions.

In the 1960s, Mao launched China’s Cultural Revolution. Cities grew overcrowded. Technocrats demanded progress from above. Anyone opposed was sent to be “re-educated.” China’s revolution was bloody, fast, and a failure, but what if America started a revolution at the same time, based on the same bad ideas, and it’s just been slower, calmer, and more effective?

In his powerful new book, Christopher F. Rufo uncovers the hidden history of left-wing intellectuals and activists who systematically took control of America’s institutions to undermine them from within.America’s Cultural Revolution finally answers so many of the questions normal Americans have, such as:

• Why is nearly every major corporation bending the knee to a far-left agenda?

• How did DEI suddenly become the department no institution can continue without?

• Why is race the main thing America’s rich, white elite wants to talk about? 

• When did the left adopt all this doublespeak, saying progress is a lack of progress, equality is not equality, speech is violence, and violence is speech?

• Has the goal of the left, for a century, actually been the destruction of every Western institution? 

Readers may not know the names of Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell, but they will recognize the ideas they spread. How their radical, destructive ideology slowly worked its way from prisons to academia to classrooms to your human resources department will come as a shock.

Failing to act soon, Rufo warns, could allow the radical left to achieve their ultimate objective: replacing constitutional equality with a race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic ‘diversity and inclusion’ officials. Most Americans don’t want this, but most Americans are no longer in control of our institutions. If the mainstream media’s depiction of a failing dystopia in need of a fresh start never sounded right to you, this expose and call to arms is the book you’ve been looking for. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/white-ethnic-flight-from-americas-cities/

In 1965, then undersecretary of labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan foresaw a problem that was about to undo the promise of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and his boss Lyndon Jonson’s 1965 launch of the “Great Society.”

In reading her dissenting opinion last week on the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court, I got the distinct impression that Justice Sonia Sotomayor never read Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, likely never heard of it, and certainly had no idea of how prescient it would prove to be.

Despite the “full recognition of their civil rights,” argued Moynihan, black Americans were growing increasingly discontent. They were expecting that equal opportunities would “produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups,” but, added Moynihan, “This is not going to happen.” Nor did he think it ever would happen “unless a new and special effort is made.”

Nearly sixty years later Moynihan’s warning seems all the more prophetic. Herculean efforts have been made over the years to  achieve “equal results,” but none has addressed the core issue. Wrote Moynihan:

The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence— not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated.

In a Father’s Day speech in 2008 then candidate Barack Obama affirmed Moynihan’s worst fears. “Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important,” Obama told the congregation at a Chicago church.

Here, Obama spoke with a candor not heard since Lyndon Johnson threw Moynihan under the bus. “But if we are honest with ourselves,” he continued, “we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

https://www.amazon.com/Heretics-Manifesto-Essays-Unsayable/dp/1913019861/ref=sr_1_1?crid=DN5PRJGF07PR&keywords=
Brendan O’Neill is the chief political writer for spiked magazine, based in London. He was spiked’s editor from 2007 to 2021.

Can a woman have a penis? Is the West forever stained by racism? Are we all going to die from climate change? To the liberal establishment of London, New York or Sydney, the answer to all of these questions is ‘Yes’. And anyone who disagrees is a racist, climate-denying transphobe.”

Our elites have become convinced of some very strange and extreme ideas. And yet there is precious little pushback against them. Critics are cowed by the threat of shaming, cancellation, even arrest. The new orthodoxies of our age are risible, and yet the space for dissent is shrinking.

We need more heretics. Throughout history, it has been those brave enough to puncture the prevailing groupthink who have propelled society forward. But they are in shockingly short supply today. In this collection of original essays, Brendan O’Neill remakes the case for heresy – and commits a few heresies of his own along the way.