RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-odyssey-of-roosevelt-montas/

His education in the ‘Great Books’ and in the purpose of the humanities has enabled him to write a valuable and persuasive book.

Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation, by Roosevelt Montás (Princeton University Press, 248 pages, $24.95)

Roosevelt Montás was born very poor in a remote rural village in the Dominican Republic in 1973 and managed to immigrate with family members to the United States in 1985, living in impoverished circumstances and broken homes in New York City. He has now written a poignant and edifying book about how he emerged from such circumstances and ended up getting bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in English and comparative literature from Columbia University and becoming a key instructor and administrator in the famous Columbia undergraduate liberal-arts program generally known as the Core Curriculum, now a century in operation. Rescuing Socrates is a valuable and thoughtful book both sociologically and educationally, making a contribution to the ongoing debate over the past, present, and future of liberal-arts education in the United States.

It is temptingly easy to see Montás’s success story in assimilating to Anglophone, elite Western intellectual culture as in fact the rare exception that proves the general rule that for poor, immigrant, racial- and ethnic-minority students the very structure of Western high culture and institutions is essentially irrelevant, useless, exclusive, humiliating, and destructive. What about the other 95 percent of such students who did not happen to encounter a passionately committed high-school teacher who encouraged a bookish young man’s accidental discovery of a discarded copy of some of Plato’s dialogues?

Yet Montás’s book is sufficiently complex and deep in its treatment of large-scale cultural and curricular issues to warrant wide and careful reading about our current educational condition. Though he has indeed become a vigorous spokesman for “Great Books” education, his own upward path is not unduly idealistic or unrealistic about ethnic, linguistic, and class dynamics: Only on the surface is it a story of “making it.”

Living in socially anarchic urban circumstances, Montás went to a nonselective, multiethnic high school in the New York City borough of Queens, and a dedicated teacher mentored him and suggested he enroll in an intensive summer program, at Columbia University, sponsored by New York State for able lower-income and socially disadvantaged students, HEOP: the Higher Education Opportunity Program. The social and emotional costs of this program were wounding but were ultimately outweighed by the benefits of induction into the middle-class Anglophone educational milieu that enabled him subsequently to get admitted on scholarship to Columbia.

The progressive left has gone Race Crazy—and they want to take America down the same path of insanity.

When did America become obsessed with racial differences? After decades of progress healing real-world prejudices and anger, we suddenly live in an America where we’re expected to view every single thing through the lens of race.

Children are taught the politics of racial resentment and fear in schools. Films, novels, and even comic books are judged by the color of their protagonists—and their adherence to the latest “woke” messaging. Corporate America has universally adopted the slogan “Black Lives Matter” in every piece of marketing, those words serving as a talisman to protect them from Twitter mobs and outraged activists. And the 1619 Project and similar pieces of academic propaganda seek to redefine and undermine the very notion of America as a unified and great nation.

Meanwhile, organized BLM advances a radical and dangerous political agenda which, if enacted, would mean the end of the American experiment as we know it. The nation faces a pivotal moment: will we reject the Race Crazies, or let them destroy us?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campaign-of-the-century-review-revisiting-kennedy-vs-nixon-11644271787

When Richard Nixon ran against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1950, his House colleague John Kennedy slipped him a $1,000 campaign contribution from the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, who liked Nixon’s anticommunist fervor. Nine years later, when the two men emerged as likely presidential nominees for their respective parties, Kennedy asked Nixon to keep the matter secret so he could avoid a political firestorm from fellow Democrats. The Californian agreed; later, when columnist Drew Pearson got wind of the story, Nixon press secretary Herb Klein denied the report. Nixon acquiesced in the public lie to honor his private commitment to the man emerging as his most threatening political rival.

This intriguing anecdote, recounted in historian Irwin F. Gellman’s “Campaign of the Century,” encapsulates the author’s central thesis—that Richard Nixon got a raw deal from campaign reporters and later historians who portrayed him as a menacing political scoundrel, when in fact he deserved greater recognition for his “high road” politics. “Those who insist on seeing Nixon only as a dark and devious character,” Mr. Gellman writes, “overlook the fact that he ran by far the more honorable, and honest, campaign.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/debunking-race-crazy-left-jason-d-hill/

Charles Love, the Executive Director of Seeking Educational Excellence (SEE) and the host of The Charles Love Show, has written a beautiful and highly stylized book that can truly be described as death by impeccable logic and reason to Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the 1619 Project. Race Crazy: BLM, 1619, and the Progressive Racism Movement is a brilliant tour de force that identifies, and then destroys with surgical precision, the false claims made by both movements. More importantly, Love has exposed the egregious harm they inflict on the moral reputation of all black Americans, and the nefarious indictment they make against America as an evil country.

In Race Crazy he sets the record straight in debunking these shibboleths and, in the process, restores grandeur and honor to America, and reminds us of the promise of hope, redemption, and prosperity she delivers to those blessed to live up to her name.

I interviewed him recently about the success of his latest book.

Jason D. Hill: Charles, congratulations on your new bestseller. The extant literature on Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Movement and—yes, what we can call Progressive Racism as deployed through Critical Race Theory and woke ideology is gargantuan. What makes your book stand apart from all the other books and articles on the subjects, and why did you decide to write it?