RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/review/2022/04/beyond-the-reach-of-debate-evidence-and-logic/

Even as the wave of wokeness seems at its peak, there are signs it could be about to break. ‘Defund the police’ is being replaced in many US cities that embraced it in 2020 with ‘Refund the police’. The 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race was won by Republican Glenn Younkin, in part a voter rejection of the teaching of critical race theory in schools. President Biden’s deep trough of climate change and social spending demanded by the Democrats’  Bernie Sanders wing crashed in the Senate. The re-emergence of serious geopolitics with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has re-oriented energy policy in Europe and elsewhere. And women are pushing back against the transgender activists to protect their sports and facilities from encroachment. It’s encouraging, despite the depressing grip woke agendas have rapidly gained in many public and private organisations.

Encouraging, too, is that the once isolated critical voices, such as Jordan Peterson, are becoming a choir, even if not yet a massed choir.

Joining the chorus is John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University and regular New York Times columnist. And he’s black. He wrote his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has
Betrayed Black America, on his porch in the summer of 2020, when the US was engulfed in the civil unrest following the killing of George Floyd.

In 2012, on his third tour of duty, an improvised explosive device left Dan Crenshaw’s right eye destroyed and his left blinded. Only through the careful hand of his surgeons, and what doctors called a miracle, did Crenshaw’s left eye recover partial vision. 

And yet, he persevered, completing two more deployments. Why? There are certain stories we tell ourselves about the hardships we face – we can become paralyzed by adversity or we can adapt and overcome. We can be fragile or we can find our fortitude. Crenshaw delivers a set of lessons to help you do just that. 

Most people’s everyday challenges aren’t as extreme as surviving combat, and yet our society is more fragile than ever: exploding with outrage, drowning in microaggressions, and devolving into divisive mob politics. The American spirit – long characterized by grit and fortitude – is unraveling. We must fix it.

That’s exactly what Crenshaw accomplishes with Fortitude. This book isn’t about the problem, it’s about the solution. And that solution begins with each and every one of us. We must all lighten up, toughen up, and begin treating our fellow Americans with respect and grace. 

Fortitude is a no-nonsense advice book for finding the strength to deal with everything from menial daily frustrations to truly difficult challenges. More than that, it is a roadmap for a more resilient American culture. With meditations on perseverance, failure, and finding much-needed heroes, the book is the antidote for a prevailing “safety culture” of trigger warnings and safe spaces. Interspersed with lessons from history and psychology is Crenshaw’s own story of how an average American kid from the Houston suburbs went from war zones to the halls of Congress – and managed to navigate his path with a sense of humor and an even greater sense that, no matter what anyone else around us says or does, we are in control of our own destiny.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/warhol-the-void-beneath-the-emptiness/

Warhol, A Life as Art
by Blake Gopnik
Penguin, 2021, 976 pages, $35

“If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back,” wrote George Orwell in partial explanation of the success of Salvador Dali. Surrealism was an influential example to Andy Warhol too, who, as Blake Gopnik tells us, was a life-long fan of Dali and his pranks. Like Dali, Warhol moved from painting to the more graphic possibilities of film, and, like Dali, Warhol indulged a taste for obscenity. The connections in sensibility are closer than one would think: Dali, like Warhol, had worked as a window dresser for the Bonwit Teller department store in New York, and Warhol even inherited a “muse” from Dali, one Isabelle Dufresne, known as “Ultra Violet”, a French over-dresser, as one of his Factory harpies.

And then there was Marcel Duchamp, the arch-Dadaist, who discovered the “ready-mades” by placing a porcelain urinal on a pedestal in a gallery, signing it “R MUTT 1917”, and declaring it art. So was conceptual art born, in which the idee outranked the objet in importance, a form of art in which Warhol was formally schooled and which he and some other artists used to eventually annihilate the importance of the object altogether. At many turns in the road of Warhol’s career Gopnik identifies a Duchampian precedent, which is a salutary reminder that not only was Warhol often derivative, but his inspiration involved a good deal of ironic humour at the expense of his clients. Warhol developed a deliberate Sphinx-like demeanour as an accompaniment to the art, which was easy to misidentify as profundity rather than cheek. Duchamp, having made his point about the pea-and-thimble trick of Aestheticism, and with characteristic Dadaist unpredictability, at least had the decency to retire early with Gallic sangfroid—he gave up art for chess in 1923—but Warhol was never satisfied with what he had achieved (or earned) with Pop Art, and muddled on until the peculiar circumstances of his own legend turned him into a commercial phenomenon.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/04/04/conservatisms-unsung-hero/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

Who wrote the Sharon State­ment, the conservative move­­ment’s most enduring state­ment of principle? Who founded the National Journalism Center, which has graduated more than 2,000 aspiring reporters, including such luminaries as Greg Gutfeld, Ann Coulter, John Fund, Timothy Carney, and William McGurn?

Who wrote a revisionist history on Senator Joe McCarthy proving he was wrong about the number of communists in the U.S. government — that he un­der­estimated their number? Who was the chairman of the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which became the movement’s largest public gathering? Who appeared on more campuses starting in the 1950s and into the 2010s than almost any other conservative speaker? Who coined axioms such as “The trouble with con­servatives is that too many of them come to Washington thinking they are going to drain the swamp, only to discover that Washington is a hot tub” and “When ‘our people’ get to the point where they can do us some good, they stop being ‘our people’”?

One person accomplished all this and more — the wise and ever witty M. Stanton Evans, the subject of a marvelous biography by conservative his­torian Steven Hayward. We are often told we “must” read this or that book, but M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom is truly a must-read because it is the story of one of the most consequential but unsung heroes of the conservative movement.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26087/new-book-release

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

I am thrilled to announce the release of my new book, The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage. The book exposes the sinister attack on the nuclear family as the primary strategy in globalism’s asymmetric warfare on America. The family presents a competing ideology that must be destroyed in order to collapse America from within, and impose the Great Reset of technocracy and transhumanism. The “New Normal” replaces family bonding with feudal bondage in the global Managerial State where you will own nothing and be happy. Globalism’s war on America is psychological warfare, an information war fought without bullets.

I am including the book’s introduction and hope you find it helpful. I believe that it is impossible to solve a problem without understanding the problem. My goal is for people to understand that we are in a worldwide war between globalism and the nation state, and we must resist to preserve our freedom. The book is available in paperback, hardback, and ebook online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble  Additionally, it can be ordered from any bookstore anywhere in the world.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/15/in-search-of-an-american-citizen/

The meaning of American citizenship has been eroding for quite some time. American globalists—an oxymoron if there ever was one—have been taking pointers from the playbook of the European Union and its power station, the World Economic Forum. Arguments for open borders, against national sovereignty, as well as erasure of human differences under the guise of fake multiculturalism diminish the nation-state. Ideology has taken over and seeped into public policy.

In his book, The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State, Edward J. Erler probes the philosophical and legal questions about American citizenship. The idea of global government is continuously imposed on sovereign nations, especially the United States since it is one of the most powerful nations in the world. Erler moves through several fundamental aspects of citizenship—sovereignty, birthright, and the needs of a functioning society—deftly and effortlessly. In particular, his contribution to the legal questions of American citizenship, particularly birthright citizenship, will be of great interest not only to constitutional scholars but also to a broader audience deliberately kept in the dark about legal and constitutional precedents. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/15/poking-the-deplorable-bear/

“The United States is coming to an end. The question is how.” 

Those are the opening lines of The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, by Canadian journalist Stephen Marche. It is one of several new books examining the possibility of our current political differences escalating into open conflict. 

Marche’s book purports to be a fair-minded analysis of our partisan divide, but isn’t. His effort is interesting mainly as a sociological exhibit of the incurious leftist mind. The author launches his investigation by claiming that he has no stake in American politics, considering himself neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Yet on virtually the same page where he makes this statement he writes ominously about “the rise of the hard-right anti-government patriot militias” without so much as hinting at the existence of any leftist extremists. In fact, Marche claims “Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization.” (Keep that bizarre claim in mind; it turns up elsewhere.) 

Almost unbelievably, in a book devoted to the growing political divisions in the United States, the deadly and ideologically charged riots of 2020 are not even mentioned. In his single reference to the black-clad anarcho-Marxists who sacked the downtowns of major cities, Marche states, “Antifa does exist, but it lacks any power or the means to establish power. Left-wing defiance of federal authority, when it comes, tends to be legalistic and political.” 

The Next Civil War is shallow and tendentious, and Marche tells at least one flat-out lie, alleging that the January 6 “rioters beat a policeman to death on the steps of the Capitol.” Amazingly, however, Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them is even worse, flaunting its ideological blinders right out of the gate. 

Walter opens her book, released in January of this year, by solemnly recounting the 2020 “plot” to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. As with Marche, there’s no excuse for not knowing the facts. Last July, Buzzfeed published a major story revealing how the FBI all but orchestrated this ridiculous escapade. Subsequent revelations by other journalists and media outlets (including Julie Kelly right here at American Greatness) have uncovered even more sordid details about the FBI’s questionable conduct. But Walter—a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego—studiously avoids noticing any of these inconvenient revelations, and clings dogmatically to the feds’ official narrative, which nicely confirms her narrative about the “white nationalist” threats that leave her “alarmed but not altogether surprised.” 

Both of these books are simply regime-compliant propaganda, designed to indict the Right preemptively and hold it responsible for any open conflict that might unfold in the coming months or years. Like Marche, Walter mentions Antifa only once, and only to make the same repugnant argument: “anti-fascist” thugs bashing skulls are problematic only because “the specter of left-wing radicals flexing their muscle will be what right-wing extremists invoke—to stoke fear and, ultimately, justify their own violence.”