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BOOKS

We Aren’t Raising Adults. We Are Breeding Very Excellent Sheep. Our elite college graduates know how to imitate, but they don’t know how to be independent. William Deresiewicz

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-arent-raising-adults-we-are-breeding?token=

I have given up on being able to properly pronounce the last name of today’s guest writer. But anytime I see the byline William Deresiewicz I make sure to read very carefully. He first came on my radar through friends who raved about him as a professor at Yale. But Deresiewicz separated himself from that herd when he wrote the book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” which presaged so much of what we see today—and what he writes about, in part, in the essay below.

Keep an eye peeled for Deresiewicz’s new book, “The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society,” which will be out this August. — BW

….

I taught English at Yale University for ten years. I had some vivid, idiosyncratic students—people who went on to write novels, devote themselves to their church, or just wander the world for a few years. But mostly I taught what one of them herself called “excellent sheep.”

These students were excellent, technically speaking. They were smart, focused, and ferociously hard-working.

But they were also sheep: stunted in their sense of purpose, waiting meekly for direction, frequently anxious and lost.

Woke Medicine: A Prescription for Disaster REVIEW: ‘Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns’ by Stanley Goldfarb, M.D.Christine Rosen

https://freebeacon.com/culture/woke-medicine-a-prescription-for-disaster/

It is a popular sport among those on the progressive left to dismiss conservatives’ concerns about the spread of “woke” ideology (such as Critical Race Theory and “antiracism” training) in public education and corporate culture. Parents are scolded for suggesting that seeing the world through the “lens of CRT” or the factually challenged posturing of the 1619 Project might be harmful to their children’s education, and employees are chastised for questioning the effectiveness of new mandates on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The implication is that only a racist would resist the new “antiracism.”

And yet, there is one arena in which woke thinking is not merely politically polarizing, but deadly. As Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a nephrologist and associate dean for curriculum at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns, the “quiet woke revolution” that had been going on in medicine for some time “erupted in spring 2020 into a full-blown revolution”—one with ongoing negative consequences.

That year, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing protests, and amid a global pandemic, doctors and medical students began going well beyond their remit as physicians to embrace the role of social justice activists. “Led by a cadre of woke administrators who embraced the tenets of critical race theory, the medical establishment was committing itself to a misguided focus on anti-racism and equity in all aspects of the health-care system,” Goldfarb writes.

Groups of physicians organized under names such as White Coats for Black Lives, and issued manifestos that were little more than crypto-Marxist argle bargle: A June 2021 statement outlined the group’s mission of “dismantling dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism,” for example. When “just what the doctor ordered” means a lecture on the harms of the cisheteropatriarchy, it is clear medicine has strayed far from its professional purpose.

Goldfarb makes short work of many of the faulty “antiracism” medical studies that take as their starting point the new popular assumption that medicine is racist.

The Thrill and Terror of the World on the Brink of World War II By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_thrill_and_terror_of_the_world_on_the_brink_of_world_war_ii.html

The mood in the U.S. during the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany could have been personified in Charles Lindbergh, America’s aviation hero of those times. An antisemite, he admired German efficiency and felt that America shouldn’t waste its resources helping Britain battle the Nazis.  Ordinary Americans, too, were focused not on Hitler, but on the domestic economy.  The shadow of the Great Depression was looming.   Why sacrifice blood and treasure to save Europe?  A negotiated peace with Hitler was acceptable.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took first took office in 1933 and held four terms until his death in 1945, knew that the U.S. must actively engage in international affairs.  But he was restricted by the isolationist sentiment saturating the nation.  And since he needed congressional support for his domestic New Deal policies, FDR was wary of going against the grain.  In the mid-1930s, however, tensions increased as German invasions began.  With war clouds gathering over Europe, the need for U.S. involvement became apparent.

In Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler, David McKean presents a gripping, well documented history of America’s turnaround — from watching from the sidelines to fighting the Nazi evil.  FDR’s decisions were influenced by his ambassadors in five capitals: Breckinridge Long in Rome; William Bullitt in Moscow, and later Paris; Joseph P. Kennedy in London; and William Dodd in Berlin.  As was customary, FDR rewarded friends and campaign contributors with such appointments.  But he was aware of their strengths and foibles and tempered their reports with his astute judgment.

The Dumbest Generation Grows Up Is One Smart Book By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-generation-grows-up-is-one-smart-book/

There is a sense abroad that generational change has placed the essentials of our constitutional system and its supporting culture at risk. Many Millennials — the generation now in their 20s and 30s — have soured, not only on fundamentals like freedom of speech, but on the American story as such. Various writers have tried to make sense of this disturbing cultural shift. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt highlight a certain style of parenting. Mary Eberstadt explores the implications of family decline. Now, Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, adds some crucial missing pieces to the puzzle. His focus — social media and education — may seem well-worn, but you’ve never seen them approached like this.

I’ll get to substance, but first I want to address the striking tone of the book. Although the work is well-documented and thoughtfully argued, the overall feel is singular and unconventional. There is something “prophetic” about this book. I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of “predicting the future,” although Bauerlein’s 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, to which this is a follow-up, did in fact foresee, against the then-reigning idealization of the Millennials, many of the problems they’re experiencing today.

No, I mean that Bauerlein’s willingness to openly and uncompromisingly confront, and in a sense denounce face to face, America’s young — as well as the Boomer mentors who failed them — has the ring of the biblical prophets about it. After publishing The Dumbest Generation, Bauerlein was invited by many colleges and universities to address their students (and professors) in person. After taking his audiences to task for devoting more attention to selfies and “likes” than to serious history and art, Bauerlein would often find himself booed.

An awakening: Conservatives vs. progressives By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/an_awakening_conservatives_vs_progressives.html

George C. Leef has written a wonderful, definitive book that lays out the difference between self-identified progressives and conservatives.  The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time is a fictionalized narrative about a Washington Post journalist — a progressive leftist, of course — who is chosen to write an official biography of the first female president, Patricia Farnsworth.  The facts of this woman’s eight years in office are essentially the Obama/Biden two terms in all but name.  Their destructive policies, briefly interrupted by the successful presidency of Donald Trump, are all in play again.  The Supreme Court has been packed.  Offending statues have been duly destroyed.  Riots and protests are endemic, often staged for political purposes.  Opponents of the left have been virtually silenced.  The book feels as though it was written in just the past few weeks, so accurate are the devastating consequences of progressive policies Americans are enduring under Biden.

Van Arsdale is at first thrilled at the opportunity to write about the woman she has long considered heroic.  She has written numerous columns celebrating Farnsworth’s policies, implemented to transform America without regard for the Constitution.  Both women pride themselves on their successful gambits that have destroyed opponents and won elections.  Farnsworth even brags about having ballots ready to submit if needed.  Arsdale is selected because she is particularly skilled at constructing progressive narratives to go with any event, policy, or disaster without letting facts get in her way.  She has fully embraced the dictates of gender and identity politics.  She knows how to slant any story, how to obscure inconvenient facts in order to make any column suitably progressive.  As a lover of classical music, she attends concerts in disguise because, among her friends and colleagues, classical music is “problematic” since most composers were white.  She would have heartily supported the We See You White American Theater manifesto.  Shakespeare is also “problematic.”

How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story by Gulbahar Haitiwaji

The first memoir about the “reeducation” camps by a Uyghur woman.
 
“I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.”
— Gulbahar Haitiwaji toParis Match

Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao.
 
Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the ‘reeducation’ camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell.
 
These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders.
 
The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.

Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It Paperback – June 28, 2016 by Alexander G. Markovsky

Written by a Soviet émigré and scholar of Marxism, the book begins with the author’s recounting of the end of the Cold War. Despite the common perception that democracy defeated communism, the author presents evidence that the Democratic Party has adopted Marxism in a new philosophy he calls Liberal Bolshevism. Mr. Markovsky trucks the origins of Liberal Bolshevism back to the policies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and chronicles the transformation of the Democratic Party into the Social Democratic Party. Through the prism of Marxism the author traces the rhythms and patterns of the toxic amalgamation of liberalism and socialism from Lenin to Obama and binds together the Democratic Party’s policies into a Marxist-socialist cause that American Social Democrats, just like their Soviet predecessors, are committed to achieving at all costs.

Herein, the reader will find a reassessment of accepted postulates exposing the deeply rooted racism and anti-Semitism of the Democratic Party. The book also challenges vested views of socialism and capitalism. Overall, the work is intended as a dissident course of economics and political education.

Reviling the West Peter Wood

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/30/reviling-the-west/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

EXCERPT:

The story Murray tells here is less about the old fault lines in our civilization than it is about our strange susceptibility to believing the worst about ourselves. He doesn’t really venture an explanation of this pathology, though he locates its essential basis in the willingness of Westerners to credit the idea that white people are somehow transcendentally racist — unlike the rest of humanity, which is apparently graced with innate tolerance and respect for human difference. 

As a compendium of the absurdities of our age, The War on the West would be hard to surpass. As an explanation of our descent into this Boschian hell-scape, Murray’s book is circumspect. He calls attention to how those who revile our civilization steadfastly refuse to apply the same standards to any other culture or society. He observes — as have many others — that many people outside the West see with perfect lucidity that the West is both fundamentally different from and better than their own cultural legacies, and for that reason they seek to come to Western societies. They are immune to the cultural self-loathing invented by Western intellectuals, so rampant in all our key institutions. 

Murray lays out the optimistic possibility that we will discover a way “to make our multi-ethnic realities work.” But he worries that something like the opposite is taking shape: a form of Western identity along “exclusionary lines,” i.e., meeting hatred of the West with reciprocal hatred of those who slander it. Of course, the third possibility is that those who foment anti-Westernism will prevail and impose their own oppressive dystopia, not unlike what already exists on many college and university campuses. 

Idiot Grandson of Haitian General Explains Why He Hates the Constitution A guide to the unconstitutional ignorance of Elie Mystal. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/idiot-grandson-haitian-general-explains-why-he-daniel-greenfield/

Elie Mystal, the grandson of a Haitian general and the son of a lying politician, made headlines when he told the fellow constitutional scholars of The View, that the Constitution is “trash”.

The idiot racist son of a Haitian immigrant, whose gratitude for the country that took in his worthless family is only matched by his aptitude for wearing his hair like it was just caught in an exploding vacuum cleaner, was on tour to promote his book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, by insulting the document that allows him to do so.

Despite (or because of) a degree from Harvard Law, Mystal can barely spell “Constitution”.

That hasn’t stopped MSNBC from having him on every 5 minutes to offer deep thoughts on how everything is racist, the Founding Fathers were dumb and the Constitution is terrible.

In his book, which seems to have been researched by reading random tweets, Mystal claims that our “current interpretation of the Second Amendment was invented by the National Rifle Association in the 1970s” because in “the 1960s, Republicans were all about gun control, because in the 1960s Black people thought that they should start carrying guns.”

It’s understandable that Mystal, whose father had just arrived from Haiti on a soccer scholarship in the sixties, knows nothing about American history. If you believe Mystal, the right to bear arms was something Republicans came up with in the sixties because they hated black people.

THE PERSECUTION OF GEORGE CARDINAL PELL

Innocent!

That final verdict came after George Cardinal Pell endured a gruelling four years of accusations, investigations, trials, public humiliations, and more than a year of imprisonment after being convicted by an Australian court of a crime he did not commit.  

Led off to jail in handcuffs, following his sentencing on March 13, 2019, the 78-year-old Australian prelate began what was meant to be six years in jail for “historical sexual assault offenses”. Cardinal Pell endured more than thirteen months in solitary confinement, before the Australian High Court voted 7-0 to overturn his original convictions. His victory over injustice was not just personal, but one for the entire Catholic Church.

Bearing no ill will toward his accusers, judges, prison workers, journalists, and those harbouring and expressing hatred for him, the cardinal used his time in prison as a kind of “extended retreat”.  He eloquently filled notebook pages with his spiritual insights, prison experiences, and personal reflections on current events both inside and outside the Church, as well as moving prayers.