RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/dragon-slayers-mark-tapson/

What is the difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth? About six months.

Vindicated conservatives have been circulating that meme on the internet in the wake of being proven correct about every single thing the Left has denied over the last couple of years as nutty, right-wing conspiracy theories: from the Wuhan lab origins of the coronavirus, to Critical Race Theory being taught in schools, to the existence of a shadow government known as the Deep State (the Wikipedia entry for the Deep State insists four times in the first four sentences that this notion is a debunked conspiracy theory).

The Deep State, or “Swamp,” not only exists, but has roots reaching much farther back than just the presidency of Donald Trump, whose outsider status and populist appeal posed an unprecedented threat to the many-tentacled shadow government. That is the subject of the must-read new book Dragonslayers: Six Presidents and Their War With the Swamp, by the prolific historian Larry Schweikart. Dr. Schweikart’s previous works include, among others, Reagan: The American President (about which I previously interviewed him here), 48 Liberal Lies About American History, and A Patriot’s History of the United States (co-written with Michael Allen).

(That last title, by the way, is a much-needed antidote to the radical propagandist Howard Zinn’s poisonous, subversive People’s History of the United States, which has infected nearly every schoolroom in America for the last four decades. If only Schweikart’s book had been taught as widely since its publication in 2004, then perhaps we wouldn’t be reeling from the violent anti-Americanism of a couple of generations of youth brainwashed to despise our country, its values, and its Constitution.)

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/11/m-stanton-evans-prophet-of-our-moment/

The essay is adapted from “M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom,” by Steven F. Hayward (Encounter, 400 pages, $33.99).

Although M. Stanton Evans passed on only seven years ago, he is already being forgotten by the current generation of conservatives and is wholly unknown to a rising generation of young conservatives. This is a shame, not only because he deserves to be remembered on his merits alone, but because in many ways he anticipated both the conservative populism that finally expressed itself with the arrival of Donald Trump, and a deep antipathy toward our foreign and defense policy elites that is also a highly salient conservative disposition of today. Stan perceived both things more than 50 years ago, and can be said to have anticipated—and approved of—national conservatism before anyone else.

Evans was a remarkable figure who was in the middle of key moments of the conservative movement since shortly after he graduated from Yale in 1955. A working journalist for more than 40 years, he also found time to be the principal author of the Sharon Statement that marked the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom. He wrote the statement of the “Manhattan 12” that declared a “suspension” of conservative support for President Nixon in 1971. As chairman of the American Conservative Union in the mid-1970s, he founded the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that is now the veritable Woodstock for any ambitious conservative politician.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/dialectical-faucism-lloyd-billingsley/

In response to plunging polls, Joe Biden wants to roll back the public health security state but keep his emergency powers. The key figure in that quest is White House advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, profiled at length in The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but in 1968 hired on with the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fauci’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, but in 1984 he became head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

According to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), Fauci did not understand electron microscopy, did not understand medicine, and was thus unqualified for the post. Fauci’s prediction that AIDS would ravage the general population was hopelessly wrong, but he remained at the helm of NIAID, steadily gaining power.

Fauci knew that gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more transmissible and lethal, could launch a pandemic, but in 2019 he funded such research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which also received a cargo of deadly pathogens from Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory, courtesy of Chinese national Dr. Xiangguo Qiu.

In early 2020, Fauci opposed President Trump’s ban on travel from China. He backed the lockdowns that caused widespread suffering and loss for the American people.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2012/06/deluded-tyrant-in-the-kremlin/

In December 1564, Ivan IV took himself off into exile. From the remoteness of Aleksandrova Sloboda he wrote two letters to officials in Moscow, one announcing his abdication, the other stipulating that he would return to the throne only on condition he be granted absolute power. There were positive aspects to Ivan’s rule, especially in the earlier years, and “Fearsome” rather than “Terrible” might be a better rendering of his popular designation, and yet there is something wretchedly Russian about those obtuse boyars pleading, in the end, for Ivan’s royal restitution. Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face and even more so David Satter’s It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway do nothing to disabuse us of the notion that Russia as a whole remains clueless when it comes to addressing the most basic principles of democracy and the rights of the individual.

In August 1999, Boris Yeltsin announced that Vladimir Putin, Head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), was to be the new prime minister of Democratic Russia. Shortly thereafter, contends Gessen, the FSB made Yeltsin an offer he could not refuse. If Yeltsin allowed Putin to replace him as the president of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin could expect to enjoy the full protection of the intelligence service for the rest of his days, along with immunity from prosecution for any transgressions committed during a decade in office. The ailing and politically vulnerable Yeltsin assented. For almost seventy years the Chekists had been the sword and shield of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Now, thanks to the demise of the USSR and Yeltsin’s instinct for self-preservation, a criminal cabal with a lineage dating back to Felix Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka commenced ruling Russia in its own right.

As a consequence, argues Gessen, Vladimir Putin has spent the past twelve years effectively transforming Russia “into a supersize model of the KGB”, the world’s first bona fide mafia state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/robert-spencers-critical-quran-explained-key-danusha-v-goska/

If I were queen, I would reward every reader who completed Robert Spencer’s new book, The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. The Critical Qur’an is an essential book that every thinking person would benefit from reading. About one in four humans is a Muslim. Given child marriage, polygyny, and women’s low status, Muslims have high fertility rates and the percentage of the world’s population that is Muslim is predicted to increase till Islam is the world’s majority religion in 2075. While it is true that the Qur’an is often not read or understand by most Muslims, Muslims do revere the Qur’an. Muslims may have little idea what the book contains, but they are ready to kill over it. When, in 2005, Newsweek circulated false rumors that Americans were flushing Qur’ans down toilets – which is of course impossible – at least seventeen people were killed in ensuing violence and “a council of more than 300 mullahs …threatened to declare holy war.”

In the past, reading the Qur’an was difficult. Some translations used pseudo-King-James English, for example archaic forms like “thee, thou, thine,” in an attempt to make the Qur’an sound Biblical, and, therefore, holy. Some translations attempt to paper over the Qur’an’s lack of clarity by adding parenthetical fixes. For example, Qur’an 2:1 begins “Alif Lam Meem.” No one knows what this means. One translation tries to “help” the reader with a parenthetical explanation: “Alif-Lam-Mim. [These letters are one of the miracles of the Quran and none but Allah (Alone) knows their meanings].” The reader is left to wonder how the incoherent equals the miraculous. Translators try to draw a smiley face over darker Qur’anic passages. “Jihad,” which clearly means actual warfare to claim territory, booty, corpses, and slaves for Allah, is translated as “struggle.” Spencer’s new translation avoids these pitfalls, and, on the sentence level, it is easy to read.

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.