RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.” 

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/03/21/catching-the-windbag/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932–1975, by Neal Gabler (Crown, 928 pp., $40)

America needs more Kennedy biographies about as much as it needs more Kennedys. As the family’s mystique peters out into ineffectuality, alcoholism, and anti-vaxxism, the assumption that any Kennedy should and will be a winner at the polls has dissolved — even in Massachusetts, where Joe Kennedy III (a grandson of Bobby) lost convincingly to Ed Markey in the 2020 Democratic Senate primary. For Bay State voters, it must have felt like that liberating moment when you finally throw out the old address book with your ex’s number in it. Nonetheless, the family still keeps biographers busy (this book is the first of a planned two volumes; don’t say you weren’t warned).

The author of Catching the Wind — Neal Gabler, until now mostly a Holly­wood historian — is nothing if not meticulous. He has, for example, catalogued each of the dozen or so times Ted’s parents moved him to a different prep school, as well as the weight fluctuations that plagued him even in childhood. Then there’s this entry in the index: “Kennedy, Edward Moore ‘Ted,’ womanizing of, xxxi, 82–83, 88, 89, 395, 538, 547–49, 550–52, 554, 581, 601–2” — and on this topic the author makes no attempt to be comprehensive, but eventually just gives up; there’s considerably more information on Ted’s love of sailing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/barr-code-lloyd-billingsley/

“I had been increasingly concerned about claims by the President and the team of outside lawyers advising him that the election had been ‘stolen’ through voting ‘fraud,’” writes William Barr on the first page of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, just released by William Morrow.

“There’s always some fraud in an election that large,” Barr explains, and “there may have been more than usual in 2020,” but Barr’s Department of Justice didn’t see it changing the outcome.

On page 558, Barr enumerates President Trump’s many successes: tax reform, deregulation, the strongest and most resilient economy in American history, unprecedented progress to many marginalized Americans. As Barr recalls, President Trump restored US military strength, identified the threat from China, brokered peace deals in Middle East, pulled out of ill-advised agreements with Russia and Iran, and moved the US. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Barr notes that Trump curbed illegal immigration, enhanced border security, and “kept his promise of advancing the rule of law by appointing a record number of judges committed to constitutional principles.”  President Trump “exposed media and cultural elites as the outright partisans they have long been – mere extensions of the Democratic Party.” Trump did it all  “in the face of bitter, implacable attacks,” but it wasn’t enough.

“Trump, through his self-indulgence and lack of self-control, had blown the election.” If Trump had just exercised “a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness,” he would have won. As the two-time Attorney General has it, “the election was not ‘stolen.’ Trump lost it.”

By implication, cellar-dweller Joe Biden won it fair and square. Barr’s case is not particularly convincing, but readers may learn something new about the author.

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.