RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Four U.S. presidents have been assassinated; three of them within a thirty-six-and-a-half-year period: Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, James Garfield in July 1881, and William McKinley in September 1901. The fourth, of course, was John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It was not until McKinley’s assassination that the president was assigned a secret service detail. Even then, ex-presidents were on their own. In 1953, President Truman and his wife Bess, famously, took the train home to Independence, Missouri, mingling with passengers and without secret service protection.

Ms. Millard tells the story of James Garfield, his abbreviated tenure as President, his assassination, and the times in which he lived. It was on the 36th ballot, at the Republican convention in Chicago in early June 1880, that Ohio Congressman and former Union General James A. Garfield was nominated for the Presidency – a position he had never sought. On November 3, 1880, he was elected the 20th President of the United States, narrowly defeating Winfield S. Hancock. “Although he was by nature,” Ms. Millard wrote, “a cheerful and optimistic man, like Lincoln, he had long felt he would die an early death.” On September 19, 1881, Garfield did die of septicemia and dehydration brought on by a bullet wound, inflicted by a deranged Charles Guiteau on July 2 at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/01/11/prince-harrys-400-page-temper-tantrum/

This is the most annoying book I have read in a long time. Even the bio on the first page is annoying. The Duke of Sussex, it says, is ‘a husband, father, humanitarian, military veteran, mental-wellness advocate and environmentalist’. I’m surprised it didn’t add ‘He / him’. Environmentalist? Mother Nature might have something to say about that. The man who once flew in a private jet to a Google camp in Sicily to speak about climate change, and who snorted ‘No one is perfect’ when a hack had the temerity to point out that 60 per cent of the flights he takes are on private jets, is now putting ‘environmentalist’ in his actual bio? Now that’s chutzpah. Or gaslighting. One of those.

Actually, Spare is a big, fat, wordy act of gaslighting. It’s a 400-page tantrum about family and money and tiaras (I’m not joking). It’s primal therapy masquerading as memoir, where the aim seems to be less to tell the truth about what’s being going on in the deranged House of Windsor than to absolve Harry and Meghan of any responsibility for it. These two are never to blame for anything, apparently. Drama and malice just magically appear whenever they’re around. Curious. Most of all, Spare is an act of fraternal treachery. I don’t know much about life in a royal family. But I know about brothers. And I know that if any of my brothers did to me what Harry has done to William in this infernal book, it would be game over. The betrayal of confidence contained in this self-pitying tome is extraordinary.

Irritation drips from every page. There’s the Jamie Oliver-style banterous lingo. Harry goes on a ‘lads’ trip’ with a ‘bunch of muppets’. His grandpa, Prince Philip, liked to ‘rock a bit of scruff now and then’, he says, by which he means grow facial hair. He loves a cheeky Nando’s. That’s a surefire way of ‘enhancing my calm’, he says – ‘Nando’s chicken’. He and a mate were ‘proper fucked’ once when they tried to round up some cows. ‘Fuck fuck fuck’, he says to himself in Afghanistan, like one of the middle-class characters in a Richard Curtis film. One of his military superiors had ‘the heart of a fucking ninja’, he says. ‘And at that moment I needed a ninja.’ At Eton he watches Family Guy ‘while stoned’ and forms an ‘inexplicable bond with Stewie’.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-soviet-union-a-primer/

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by the Soviet Union. For most of my life, it was the other superpower, the villain to our hero, the anti-matter to our matter. We had freedom and prosperity; they had neither. It loomed large in our imaginations but was, as Churchill famously put it, a “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” We held their lives in our hands, and they held ours in theirs. During my teens, I read everything about the place that I could get my hands on.

In 1976, paperback editions were issued of both Russia: The People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser, who’d been the Washington Post’s correspondent in Moscow, and The Russians by Hedrick Smith, who’d held the same position at the New York Times. I read both books avidly. At around the same time, probably on the 19-cent used-book tables at the legendary Barnes & Noble annex at 5th Avenue and 18th Street, I came across a paperback entitled The Soviet Union: The First Fifty Years, edited by Harrison E. Salisbury. Published in 1967, it contained twenty-odd essays by New York Times staffers on different aspects of contemporary Soviet life and culture.

I still have my copies of these books. I paged through them just now. In all three, what stands out most is the authors’ readiness to normalize life under totalitarianism – to emphasize the good, to minimize the bad, to make Soviet life relatable to Americans by portraying it as something that, just like our own life, has its pluses and minuses. Smith warns in his foreword that readers shouldn’t “misinterpret my criticisms of certain features of the Russian way of life as constituting approval of corresponding aspects of Western society.” Similarly, Kaiser, in his introduction, writes that “when I criticize some aspect of Soviet life, implicitly or explicitly, I hope it is clear that I am not simultaneously trying to endorse the corresponding feature of Western life.” I only just now noticed the striking similarity between those two sentences. Remarkable, no?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/final-battle-david-horowitz-defines-the-fight-for-america/

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.

No American who loves our country can look at these past years without feeling that our souls have been tried. At conservative conferences and events there is an inescapable desire for a big picture sense of what we are up against and whether the fight can be won. And that is what David Horowitz offers in his latest book, “Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last”.

Since “Destructive Generation”, Horowitz has spent over three decades chronicling our national crisis in his books and few deny that we are living in the world that he had spent so long warning conservatives would come to pass if the totalitarian ambitions of the Left went unchecked.

“Final Battle” is a fitting title for a culture warrior whose message to conservatives, over and over again, was that they needed to learn to fight. This is a book that describes the fight and its missed opportunities, of those who fought and those who didn’t, and what the next phase, and perhaps the final phase, of the struggle for the country that he loves so much looks like.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/michelle_admits_she_couldnt_stand_barry.html

While promoting her self-help book The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times, during a “cross-generational” conversation in Atlanta, Michelle Obama shared deep thoughts with a panel moderated by American radio personality, rapper, singer, actress, and toady Angie Martinez.  

The star-studded, “powerful” women of color on the panel also included singer, actress, and television personality Kelly Rowland; Beyoncé’s mama, Tina “Knowles” Lawson; vitiligo spokesperson/model Winnie Harlow; and H.E.R., AKA Gabi Wilson, a singer, songwriter, musician, and actress.

In The Light We Carry, Michelle Obama penned a chapter entitled “Partnering Well.”  Based on decades of Michelle Obama’s unstinting extension of political compromise, racial conciliation, and partisan collegiality, she now must feel qualified to counsel others on how to get along with those they secretly hate.  This time, the always relatable Michelle chose to make her point by shedding “light” on her love/hate partnership with husband Barack.

Much to everyone’s surprise, soft and embraceable Michelle admitted that for more than a decade, she “couldn’t stand” her spouse.  From 1992 until 2002, while Barry was strategizing his passage from a community activist to ruler of the world, Michelle was silently aiming her death stare at someone other than Trump.

One must admit that it is impressive how Michelle manages to paint herself as the victim of whatever circumstance she happens to find herself in.  Furthermore — not that this is a competition — it’s been many years since Barack Obama graced the world stage with his awesomeness.  Yet, unlike Michelle, there are hundreds of millions of Americans who still “can’t stand” him.

As an outspoken activist, Michelle has built her reputation on perpetual scorekeeping.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-blueprint-for-a-genocide-of-existence/

A new breed of zealots has forged fourth-wave feminism, and it’s far more rabidly anti-family, anti-male, and anti-civilization than previous iterations of the ideological movement. You’d think because of its petty maliciousness and deranged radicalism, its appeal would be narrowly limited to the faculty lounges of liberal arts colleges. Yet since the inception of the #MeToo movement, the crazed foot soldiers of fourth-wave feminism managed not only to take their worldview mainstream, but also to put a headlock on the commanding heights of American culture.

This is as impressive as it is terrifying. These new nihilists are seething with toxic femininity, and the further spread of their noxious sentiment could likely spell the death of our country as we know it. Increasingly prevalent is their practice of exploiting female agency and identity to wage a blanket attack on society and men, to abolish the labor market, and to advocate for the end of the family. They are achieving these goals while simultaneously promulgating the idea that the family is by nature nefarious, and that female advancement can only come through the wholesale annihilation of heteronormative constructs of capitalism, work, and the family. The destructive consequences for relationships at every level of society—from the basic couple to the community to the nation—will be vast and irreparable.

In Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, feminist philosopher Sophie Lewis writes: “[But] I can’t wait to see what comes after the family. I also know I probably won’t live to see whatever it is. Still, I hope it happens, and I hope it is a glorious and abundant nothing.”

Lewis is convinced that the concept of family is a cancerous blight on existence and that nothing should replace it. Starting with the premise that capitalism is bad because it is coterminous with patriarchy, white supremacy, and a world that mandates work and privatizes care, her communist utopian vision would see a world in which mothering is queered, and traditional motherhood is abolished.

America is fighting a major international war, says the author. Yet, the country does not really know it. Moreover, the war is being waged on a multitude of distinct fronts—both internal and external. The United States is wholly unprepared to fight a unified battle. Threat analyst Kenneth Abramowitz carefully takes us through the first step—recognition. He then ushers readers into the bold realm of mounting a multifaceted defense that will save America as a Democracy with the capacity to continually improve and thrive.