RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senator Rand Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding previously unimaginable power, Fauci misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

One of the few leaders who dared to challenge “America’s Doctor” was Senator Rand Paul, himself a physician. Deception is his indictment of the catastrophic failures of the public health bureaucracy during the pandemic.

Senator Paul presents the evidence that:

The Covid virus was likely the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China—research funded in part by the U.S. government.
Taxpayer dollars for that research were deceptively funneled to Wuhan without the required regulatory review.
Fauci and his scientific yes-men knew from day one about Covid’s origin and tried to cover it up.
Fauci and his allies ruthlessly attacked everyone—including highly qualified scientists—who threatened to reveal the truth about the pandemic.

Why? Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants and unreported royalties were at stake, and heads would roll if the truth got out.

It almost worked. At Fauci’s insistence, the government imposed needlessly extreme lockdowns on Americans at the cost of immense personal and economic destruction.

Covid-19 was deadly, but the real killer was the coverup, led by America’s most durable medical bureaucrat—a man for whom the truth was too often expendable.

Senator Paul makes a powerful case that funding dangerous bioengineering in a totalitarian country is madness. If we don’t heed this warning, the next pandemic could be far worse.

Nationally acclaimed investigative journalist Seamus Bruner reveals how billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg plan to control every aspect of daily life—from food and energy to reproduction and your personal data.

Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs, while lab-grown meats are a rare, expensive delicacy. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip.

Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Forum get their way. Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute led by famed investigator Peter Schweizer, presents a mountain of original research and reveals shocking new evidence that shows their sinister agenda will soon become reality.

For example, the Controligarchs are:

Funding eugenics research that will allow them to pre-determine their children’s traits, creating a new caste system in which the ultrawealthy are able to hack their own biology—augmenting their intelligence with AI—to become superhuman or, they hope, immortal
Bagging billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded crony stimulus and other forms of inflation-inducing corporate welfare that has allowed this tiny elite faction to double their net worth—adding trillions of dollars to their collective holdings—while the middle and lower classes work harder to earn less
Planning for “the next pandemic,” which means reinstating their lockdowns, implementing new waves of small business closures, and, ultimately, consolidating the ownership—of everything—into fewer and fewer hands

Bruner offers a gripping and groundbreaking look into the shadowy meetings and sweetheart deals behind global social-engineering efforts, proving that, despite their stated intentions, we must never cede control of our lives to billionaires.

Amidst daily disasters ranging from bank collapses to disease outbreaks to food and energy crises—each caused or exacerbated by the expert class—this thrilling investigation into the global elite is a must hear.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_catholic_church_against_slavery_setting_the_record_straight.html

The Catholic Church, like many ancient institutions, has a checkered past.  Its record has been marred by the horrors of the Inquisition, its ambivalence towards the Nazis and the Holocaust, and its complicity in – and even cover-up of – child abuse by priests.  To its credit, however, the Church – despite some lapses – has a long and consistent history of opposing slavery.

That is the thesis of The Worst of Indignities: The Catholic Church on Slavery, the latest book by Paul Kengor.  A professor at Grove City College, Kengor is the bestselling author of over a dozen works, such as The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration; Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century; and Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.

Citing scriptural depictions of Jesus healing slaves, Kengor asserts that an exemplary, forward-thinking role against slavery can be traced to the very beginnings of Christianity – as early as the first century.  Since then, the Church’s stance has been consistent.  Papal bulls and encyclicals have condemned the abominable commerce in humans, which soared during the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 1480s through much of the 19th century. 

The stance continues to this day.  Early in the 20th century, in an encyclical called Lacrimabili Statu (Latin for in tears), Pope Pius X described slavery as “the worst of indignities,” from which the book draws its title.  Pope John Paul II, whose papacy ran from 1978 to 2005, apologized for slavery and warned against “new forms of it, often insidious.”  In the encyclical Veritatis Splendor,  he condemned slavery as “intrinsically evil,” and in a 2002 letter to Archbishop Jean-Louis Touran described human trafficking, organized prostitution, and forced labor as a “modern plague.”  The current pontiff, Pope Francis, has often condemned sex trafficking, low-paid labor, organ trade, the drugs and weapons trade, war, and organized crime.  In Fratelli Tutti, he described them as “scourges.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_elite_conspiracy_to_monopolize_opinion_through_propaganda.html

Humankind is supposedly ruled by reason. But logic isn’t effective in influencing people, individually or in a group. Advertising, public relations, and propaganda succeed precisely because they bypass reason. They hack the shortcuts the brain uses, changing people’s beliefs and behavior without their realizing it.

Sadly, we are not taught how to guard against these techniques, writes Michelle Stiles in One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda. This ignorance, she says, has “devastating consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.”

Some techniques are as old as civilization. Many books cover those used in advertising. Stiles’s scholarly book instead addresses how the ubiquitous manufacture of consent has eclipsed faith in the media and democracy, with stagecraft and narrative supplanting the search for truth. Like a 21st-century Orwell, she warns that tyranny begins with control and abuse of language. She aims to help us recognize the modus operandi of Idea Bullies, who use nefarious means to make an unwary public accept the dominant narrative.

Stiles begins with a startling fact. It wasn’t Nazi Germany or communist dictatorships that first mastered mass persuasion. It was the American government in the lead-up to U.S. involvement in World War I. The working and middle classes saw the war as a businessman’s venture and were reluctant to enlist. To overcome this resistance, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. Other key figures were Arthur Bullard, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann.

Together, they drew on and orchestrated the skills of intellectuals, journalists, local leaders, artists, businessmen, and others to get young men to believe in the cause and sign up to fight. Every means was deployed to sell the war to Americans and the world—the printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, posters, and radio. ‘Four-minute men’—essentially paid shills—would give seemingly extempore speeches at public meetings, plays, and other places to push the war effort. They doubled up as snitches. Those expressing anti-war sentiments were shamed, censored, or faced legal action. In the end, Creel could boast that the committee’s work was a “vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-to-defeat-woke-rufo-vs-hanania?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

This year saw the publication of two very important books, which are bound to shape intellectual discourse and (hopefully) public policy in coming years. Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke and Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution are the Tech Right’s response to the woke onslaught of the past decade. The two authors made their name on Twitter/X by capitalizing on anti-woke sentiment, and each ended up influencing the American right-wing despite having no previous affiliation with the Republican party.

Both books are excellent, and should be read by anyone who wants to understand the culture war. Both authors – especially Rufo, but also Hanania through CSPI – are activists and not mere writers. They deserve credit for taking the fight to the Left and being viciously attacked while doing so.

This review will compare and contrast the two books, providing a critical appraisal of their main points – while keeping in mind that both are fundamentally on the right track. I will not describe the contents of the books in detail – for that, you can read Eric Kaufmann’s excellent review.

Culture or politics?

Juxtaposing the two books helps to answer a fundamental question: how do we change society – through political or institutional/cultural capture? Obviously, both approaches are needed; after all, the left took both approaches. But at this moment of leftist hegemony, where should the right focus its efforts? In science there is a distinction between ultimate and proximate causes; if politics is downstream of culture, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say, then efforts should be concentrated on the ultimate cause, culture. But if civil rights law is the ultimate cause of woke culture, then just changing legislation will be enough.

My own position can be summarized as follows: Rufo beats Hanania. Politics is downstream of culture, and not the other way round. Of course, the two books are more complementary than they are antagonistic, and  neither claims that wokeness is singularly caused by politics or culture. However, Rufo clearly emphasizes the causal role of culture on politics, while Hanania clearly states that political decisions ultimately shape culture.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/government_gangsters_how_the_deep_state_imperils_national_security.html

Like most Americans, Kash Patel grew up believing that the country was run as a democracy, with a government that honors the will of the people and is accountable to them. 

It was only much later, as an attorney and then as a senior advisor to former president Donald Trump, that he encountered – and confronted – what has come to be called the Deep State, people at the highest levels of government, business, and culture who subvert democracy to serve their own ends.

In his recent book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth and the Battle for our Democracy, Patel describes the Deep State in broad terms as the politicization of core American institutions and the federal government.  More specifically, this oligarchy includes elected leaders, journalists, business leaders, and NGOs with leftist ideologies.  But its most entrenched and active arm comprises “members of the unelected federal bureaucracy who think they have the right to rule America, not Congress or the president.”

Courtesy Post Hill Press

The agents of the Deep State operate through a series of networks, violating their oaths of office, weaponizing the law, and spreading disinformation for political or personal gain at the expense of equal justice and national security.  He saw them in operation as the lead investigator of the Russiagate hoax. His book is not just the story of how he battled the leviathan, but also about how the Deep State can be defeated for good.

Patel knows from where he speaks.  In his 14 years as public defender and federal prosecutor, and later as a key Trump aide, he has had ample opportunity to trace the insidious machinations of the Deep State within the Department of Justice (DoJ), the FBI, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the Department of Defense (DoD), the National Security Council (NSC), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  He has been inside the belly of the beast.

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-canceling-of-the-american-mind-review-shut-up-they-said-361f80c5?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

We’re in a terrible spot, and everybody knows it. Americans on the right and left detest each other, excoriate each other and, with every flaring of rage, move further from any sense of pluralistic common cause. Citizens have lost confidence in officialdom. Fashionable ideologies that brook no good-faith dissent have surged into every corner of life. Make a minor demurral, even a joke, and you risk being subjected to the ghastly nullification rituals of what is called cancel culture.

It is this predicament, all of it, that Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott address in “The Canceling of the American Mind,” a lucid and comprehensive look at where we are and how we got here, and, less persuasively, what we can do to make things better.

The authors do not merely analyze; they are in the fray. Mr. Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defends free speech in workplaces and on campus. He is also co-author, with New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” an important 2018 book about emotional fragility among young adults. Ms. Schlott’s college interest in “Coddling” eventually brought her to FIRE; she’s also a columnist for the New York Post.

“Cancel culture” is an imperfect term, but its meaning is well understood: incidents of public shaming and professional defenestration, often ginned up by activists high on their own sanctimony. “Cancel Culture has upended lives, ruined careers, undermined companies, hindered the production of knowledge, destroyed trust in institutions, and plunged us into an ever-worsening culture war.”

When did it start? The authors say 2014, when cancellations “exploded” in higher education. By 2017, following the outward migration of campus groupthink, canceling moved into art, publishing, comedy, journalism and, more recently, medicine, science and law.