RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/from-subjects-to-citizens-and-back/

The defining conflict of our era is whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or morph into a high-tech administrative oligarchy. The late Angelo M. Codevilla called this national struggle our “cold civil war.”

Leaders in the commanding heights of our political and cultural institutions openly revile the fundamental principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. They repudiate the core concepts of republican citizenship, national borders, and government by consent of the governed. If given their way, the ruling classes will abolish the sovereignty of the American people.

Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Edward J. Erler has fought tirelessly to preserve the American way of life against these corrosive forces. In the opening pages of The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State, Erler explains how elites’ feverish efforts to destroy a duly elected president, Donald Trump, “revealed the extent to which American democracy had, indeed, transmogrified into an oligarchy.” He analyzes this “transmogrification” in terms of three interrelated dynamics: citizenship, immigration, and national sovereignty.

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Erler, a professor of political science emeritus at California State University, San Bernardino, is America’s foremost expert on the ongoing controversy over birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. He rightly argues that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause must be understood in light of the founders’ belief in natural rights, the social compact, and the consent of the governed.

https://www.canadiancitizens.org/single-post/c3rf-in-hot-interview-with-author-diane-weber-bederman

Diane Weber Bederman discusses her latest book “Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health” and spares no horses as she does so. Always controversial and critical of the post-modern, politically correct, woke narratives that have turned Western society upside down, she comes out swinging on behalf of those who need to be defended from such the most – our children and grandchildren. Is it past time for the guardians of these little ones to rise up to heed Diane’s authoritative research and analysis to protect them? Especially the grandparents of a strong and free Canada? Strap in for a very interesting and topical discussion.

Watch it on Rumble here

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/george_soros_the_man_behind_the_curtain.html

Billionaire George Soros is that rare megalomaniac who not only believes he’s a god but revels in behaving like one. “It’s a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out,” he once boasted to The Independent.

This god complex, combined with his downright amorality and bizarre ideas about society, makes the 92-year-old extremely dangerous to democracies, especially America. The warning comes loud and clear in Matt Palumbo’s recent book, The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros, which documents Soros’sdecades of financial dealings, political operations, and nefarious networks.

Early in the book, Palumbo highlights Soros’samorality, planted perhaps when his Hungarian Jewish family assumed Christian identities and collaborated with the invading Nazis. The teenaged Soros accompanied his phony godfather, who inventoried properties seized from Jewish families sent to concentration camps. Yet, he says he feels no guilt, only detachment.

“I was only a spectator; the property was being taken away. I had no role in taking away that property. So, I had no sense of guilt,” he said in a 1998 interview on 60 Minutes. He likened his actions then to his playing the markets later. “In a funny way,” he said, “it’s just like in the markets – that if I weren’t there – of course, I wasn’t doing it – but somebody else would – would be taking it away anyhow.” He recounts that period as “probably the happiest year of my life” and “a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.”

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/09/orwells-1984-from-warning-to-how-to-guide/

As highlighted in George Orwell’s 1984, language and how it is used influences how we think and act, so controlling language is a key strategy employed by totalitarian regimes of the left and right to manipulate people and enforce group think.

In Orwell’s dystopian novel what is described as New­speak leads to a situation where “thoughtcrime” is impossible as “there will be no words in which to express it”.  Such is the insidious evil of distorting language to control how people think Orwell writes in ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’, we now live in world where whoever rules is able to say “two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs”.

While the cultural-left’s use of politically correct language is widespread it should be noted using
language to persuade and convince has been evident since the time of the ancient Greeks. Rhetoric includes devices such as using emotive language, attacking the person, appealing to expert opinion and facts, generalising and employing logic and reason.

It also should be noted employing rhetoric is not restricted to the cultural-left. During America’s involvement in the Vietnam war the military used the expression ‘collateral damage’ to describe innocent civilians being injured or killed and ‘friendly fire’ when its soldiers were the victims of American firepower. Forcefully removing peasants from their farms and villages, instead of being described for what it was, was labelled as ‘pacification’.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/interview-christopher-leonard-author

There’s an illuminating scene in Christopher Leonard’s The Lords of Easy Money that talks about the difficulty of trying to communicate the intricacies of Fed policy to mass audiences. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a trusted voice of the Tea Party movement and therefore someone who would have been expected to take an interest in the Fed’s plans for a massive intervention in the economy via the quantitative easing program, took on the subject in a free-flowing broadcast. Leonard describes what ensued:

Beck scrawled a long numeral on a chalkboard: 600,000,000,000. This represented the value of bonds the Fed just announced it would buy. “This is what they call quantitative easing,” Beck said. Then he walked to a new chalkboard with a confusing flowchart written across it that included a series of large, cartoonish arrows that seemed to signify the flow of money, or influence, or something like that, behind the Fed’s new program. Confusingly, the whole thing began with organized labor, depicted by a union boss wearing a bowler’s cap and with a cigar dangling from his mouth. It got weirder and increasingly inaccurate from there. The final cartoon on the flowchart showed a group of top-hat-wearing bankers…

Leonard described Beck’s understanding of the Fed as “like that of a very high drug user who had sat in a motel room, trying to eavesdrop through the wall while people talked about central banking.” I remember the broadcast – though I wasn’t a fan of Beck’s and occasionally wondered if his chalkboard theories about Obama as both Hitler and Stalin were really a brilliant parody I was too thick to grasp, I thought he was at least trying to say something critical about a truly dangerous Fed policy.

As Leonard notes, Beck got one important thing right, that the flood of cheap money punished ordinary savers, but the rest his presentation was so far-out, and over-focused on the idea that QE risked Weimar-style hyperinflation, that his audience probably ended up with a net minus from a knowledge perspective.

This was too bad, because the media treatments on the other, more “respectable” side, at 60 Minutes, CNBC, CNN, and the like, were either completely credulous in repeating the assertions of Fed officials that its policies were needed to “jumpstart the sluggish economy” or, if they were critical at all, focused only on the narrow question of price inflation. The much more serious question of the impact of Fed policies on asset prices simply didn’t fit well in our increasingly bifurcated media landscape, which didn’t know whether to identify the concerns of a figure like Leonard’s main character Thomas Hoenig as conservative or liberal complaints. In fact, Hoenig’s worries were about inherent institutional weaknesses that concerned both left and right demographics, making his story a tough sell to either media “side.” In this sense, a book like The Lords of Easy Money is a gift to media audiences that rarely get a clear look at a confounding topic.

https://www.spiked-online.com/books/

Woke has conquered the West. Identity politics, cancel culture and trans ideology reign. Censorship and public shaming are the price you pay for dissent. How did this once fringe ideology manage to take over our institutions? And how can ordinary people fight back? These are the questions at the heart of How Woke Won, the new book by author and spiked columnist Joanna Williams. She argues that we have much more in common than the woke would have us believe – and that it is time for us to come together to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/u-s-schools-get-bad-marx/

My father was a liberal Democrat. He worshiped FDR and didn’t care much for the GOP. His parents were staunch Republicans, and the political discussions I remember from the 1950s were always entertaining—if not a bit confusing—to this eight-year-old. Importantly, while my dad was a liberal, he was a virulent anti-Communist, and saw them as just as evil as the Nazis he went to war to eradicate.

The reasons my father hated the Communists are neatly spelled out in The Naked Communist, a book written in 1958 by political theorist W. Cleon Skousen, who eerily predicted our current state of affairs. In a section titled “Current Communist Goals,” he elucidates the plan in 45 steps, explaining that “many loyal Americans are working for these same objectives because they are not aware that these objectives are designed to destroy us.”

Skousen is especially insightful on the cultural and educational strife we are now experiencing. For example, in Step 20, he writes, “Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.”

While there certainly is a conservative media, is there any doubt that the predominant mainstream media runs far-left? A good example of press manipulation was the ongoing reference to the George Floyd riots—in reality, mass violence and 164 structure fires from arson in a four-day period in 2020—as “protests.” Another was the complete suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which may very well have altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Step 24: “Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them ‘censorship’ and a violation of free speech and free press.” In a similar vein, Step 25 reads, “Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”

Compared to what we have now in films, TV, and music, Playboy and the ravings of Lenny Bruce in the 1950s seem Church-worthy.

In Step 30, Skousen foresaw the current mania to deny the greatness of George Washington and other iconic Americans who don’t toe the utopian party line.“Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the ‘common man.’”