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BOOKS

Reading, Writing and Gender Bending . By Debra Saunders

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/06/reading_writing_and_gender_bending_147132.html

The New York Times is concerned about censorship in American schools. “Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.” reads Sunday’s headline.

“Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades,” the story reports.

The story generally focuses on parents, but methinks the uptick in outrage has more to do with the books than the parents.

Books in the crosshairs, the Times reports, include “Sex Is a Funny Word,” described on Barnes & Noble’s website as “an essential resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers.”

I get that my profession loves to portray parents who oppose approved textbooks as unsophisticated and wrong-headed, but I see parents who recall a period in their childhood when they were clueless about sex — and want the same timeout for their 8-year-olds.

And they might not welcome an early-grade textbook with a drawing of a smiling child in a bathtub with text that explains, “Grown-ups call this kind of touch masturbation.”

I understand that there are young children who question their sexual identity and might welcome such a book. Their parents are free to buy that book. Other parents have the right to set limits on what schools tell their children about sex.

Schweizer Hits Another Home Run on Biden-China Corruption By John Dale Dunn

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/schweizer_hits_another_home_run_on_bidenchina_corruption.html

Peter Schweizer is an Oxford graduate, former Hoover Institution Fellow, and cofounder and president of the Government Accountability Institute of Tallahassee, Florida.  He is a widely read and interviewed investigative journalist and has authored popular and well received books on political corruption: Clinton Cash, Extortion, Throw Them All Out, and Architects of Ruin.

The book is the usual fare from Schweizer — based on well documented and researched financial records that support assertions of the author.  In this book, the focus is corruption in high places that results from cozy entanglements with China.  This book focuses on the Chinese communist connections for good reasons: China has set about a long-term effort to compromise the political, business, cultural, academic, and scientific elements of America as a set up for creating global Chinese hegemonic control and dominance.  The Chinese have accomplished a great deal in the decades since the ill begotten Kissinger Nixon opening to China in 1972, followed by the Clinton-Bush acquiescence to admission of China into the World Trade Association that was finalized with favored status in 2001.

Through these decades, the wolf, bear, coyote China has gradually expanded its dominance of world trade and economics by stealing intellectual property, using bribes and influence-purchasing, and standard espionage and propaganda methods.

The point of Red-Handed is exposing the participation of persons of influence in the West who have been compromised by Chinese efforts to buy influence and power — on a scale not previously seen.

Mr. Schweizer had a big scandal to investigate but a good team of researchers to help him organize the exposé — an exposé that warns of short-term and long-term danger for the survival of Western nations and the ascendancy of a savage and murderous Chinese communist tyrannical autocracy stained by a history of ethnic, religious, and domestic pogroms, persecutions, and genocide of immense and barbaric proportions that are numerous and stunning, extending forward from the millions of deaths of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese from starvation and systematic political purges to modern-day activities that subjugate Tibet, Hong Kong, the domestic religious minorities while pursuing external influence and dominance.

JAMES O’KEEFE: AMERICAN MUCKRAKER

This seminal work of nonfiction recounts the new journalistic mass movement of today. Compiled from over a decade of investigative reporting coupled with a vast reference of philosophical research, American Muckraker is the definitive guide of truth-telling in the video age.

ON POWER
They do have tremendous power. But in part it is because we give it to them. We are nothing, but we are not alone. Awe cannot live in fear. The moment you stop caring about what the media establishment thinks of you, is the moment you become truly free.

ON INSIDERS
The USPS whistleblower, a Marine Corps combat veteran said, “I would rather be back in Afghanistan, getting shot at by Afghans, honest to God,” than be interrogated by federal agent Russell Strasser—who coerced him by saying, “I am trying to twist you a little bit because your mind will kick in…. I am not scaring you, but I am scaring you.”

ON PRIVACY
The right to record is closely tied to the right to speak or even to take contemporaneous notes about what one sees and hears. As 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt quipped, “People committing malfeasance don’t have any right to privacy…. What are we saying—that Upton Sinclair shouldn’t have smuggled his pencil in?”

ON MEANS & ENDS
Whereas the novelist Ernest Hemingway said, “What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” Thomas B. Morgan of the 1960s New Journalism contends, “Morally defensible journalism is rarely what you feel good about afterward; it is only that which makes you feel better than you would otherwise.”

ON LITIGATION
“Polling does not decide the truth nor speak to evidence…. The New York Times have not met their burden to prove that Veritas is deceptive…claiming protections from an upstart competitor armed with a cell phone and a website. There is a substantial basis in law to proceed, to permit Project Veritas, to conduct discovery into The New York Times.” —Project Veritas v. New York Times Company; New York Supreme Court, March 18, 2021

Why Do Media Ignore Biden Family’s Corruption?

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/28/why-do-media-ignore-biden-familys-corruption/

It’s a curious thing: Obvious, credible signs about a prominent political family emerge, but federal authorities at the Justice Department and elsewhere do nothing. Meanwhile, leftist media “watchdogs,” in a classic case of gaslighting, pretend that nothing has happened.

So it is with Joe Biden and his errant son, Hunter.

A new book (“Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win“) by investigative researcher and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer makes a powerful case that the Biden family has profited handsomely from its cozy ties to China’s ruling Communist regime.

The book claims that, all in all, the Bidens raked in close to $31 million from deals in China with individuals having close ties to the Chinese government.

“In sum, each deal the Bidens secured in China was via a businessman with deep ties at the highest levels of Chinese intelligence. And in each case there appears to be little discernible business or professional service that was rendered in return for the money,” Schweizer notes.

Of particular interest is businessman Che Feng, dubbed “The Super Chairman,” by Hunter Biden. The younger Biden managed the Biden family interests while Joe remained active in politics.

As Breitbart describes him, “Che, the son of a PLA soldier, has been described in Western media as ‘a shadowy and discreet investor,’ whose father-in-law was the governor of the People’s Bank of China,” and whose business partner was the vice minister of State Security, a man by the name of Ma Jian.

Che, among the earliest of “contacts” for Hunter Biden and his partners, was key to the Bidens gaining access to the big-money deals with other influential Chinese “businessmen,” all of whom answer to Xi Jinping’s increasingly totalitarian communist regime. Indeed, Che was in effect the linchpin of the Biden network’s Chinese partners.

Eventually, partnering with a man named Henry Zhao, recommended by Che, Hunter Biden was able to forge an investment entity called Bohai Harvest RST. Though partly owned by the Bidens and their partners, Bohai received money from Chinese-government backed financial companies.

That troubling financial arrangement, Schweizer notes, “involved two financiers with ties to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence, (and) a billion-dollar private equity deal.”

The problem with such “arrangements” is obvious.

Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win by Peter Schweizer

Peter Schweizer says that, in a quarter-century as an investigative journalist, this is the scariest investigation he has ever conducted. 

That the Chinese government seeks to infiltrate American institutions is hardly surprising. What is wholly new, however, are the number of American elites who are eager to help the Chinese dictatorship in its quest for global hegemony.   

Presidential families, Silicon Valley gurus, Wall Street high rollers, Ivy League universities, even professional athletes—all willing to sacrifice American strength and security on the altar of personal enrichment.

In Red-Handed, six-time New York Times bestselling investigator Peter Schweizer presents his most alarming findings to date by revealing the secret deals wealthy Americans have cut to help China build its military, technological, and economic might. Equally as astonishing, many of these elites quietly believe the Chinese dictatorial regime is superior to American democracy.

Schweizer and his team of forensic investigators spent over a year scouring a massive trove of global corporate records and legal filings to expose the hidden transactions China’s enablers hoped would never see the light of day. And as Schweizer’s past bombshells like Profiles in Corruption, Secret Empires, and Clinton Cash all made clear, there are bad actors on both ends of the political spectrum.

Exhaustively researched, crisply told, and chilling, Red-Handed will expose the nexus of power between the Chinese government and the American elites who do its bidding.  

A Hollowed-Out Democracy An interview with author and educator Jeremy Adams. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/hollowed-out-democracy-mark-tapson/

It is no secret that America’s education system has been failing our children and our country for over a half-century now, ever since the radical left realized that subverting American institutions from within was more effective than outright domestic terrorism. But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic and remote-learning mandates, parents have gotten a glimpse of just how insidious and shocking the dumbing-down and ideological indoctrination are. Parental outrage has led to confrontations with bullying teachers unions, hostile school boards, and tone-deaf political leaders who declare openly that parents shouldn’t have a say in their children’s education.

A recent book from Regnery Press addresses this hot-button topic and laments a whole generation or more of American youth whose brains as well as souls have been “hollowed out” by ideological brainwashing, technological distraction, the disintegration of families, and the collapse of moral and civic virtues. Hollowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation, by Jeremy S. Adams, explores the different facets of this disheartening crisis, but also concludes with a rallying cry for action from a California teacher writing from within the very belly of the beast.

A graduate of Washington & Lee University and CSU Bakersfield, Jeremy Adams was the first classroom teacher inducted into the California State University, Bakersfield, Hall of Fame. He has written on politics and education for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, and many other outlets. Our mutual friend Evan Sayet, conservative political commentator and himself the author of The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto and KinderGarden Of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, put me in touch with Adams to talk a bit about Hollowed Out.

Mark Tapson:           Jeremy, thanks for the insightful dissection of the state of our culture you’ve put forth in this book. Lamenting the divide that partisan politics has created in our country, you write, “Our democracy is hollowed out because the habits, the relationships, the institutions, and the values that allow us to become thoughtful, compassionate, magnanimous, and informed citizens no longer shape and define us in the ways they once did.” Can you give us a couple of key examples?

Jeremy Adams:       I wish I could go back and add the word “content” or “fulfilled” or “joyful” to that list because every day the evidence is mounting about just how miserable—uniquely miserable, in fact—our young people have become. As to their civic deficiencies, the basic problem is a profound lack of knowledge and awareness of what went in to creating the institutions of our civilization. Almost everything they see is a consequence, they believe, of malevolent power being exercised against innocent bystanders in society.

What the Hell, and Worse America contains multitudes. And even if we don’t have a truly common language, it pays to know how truly common our language can be. By Peter W. Wood

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/what-the-hell-and-worse/

A review of  “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever,” by John McWhorter (Penguin, 288 pages, $21.49).

In my freshman year of college, way back in 1971, I took a course on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from a British-accented and British-named Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite. The course introduced me to an abundance of 16th and 17th century playwrights who were not named William Shakespeare, upon whom Professor Satterthwaite cast so intense a light that we would be blinded to other sources of illumination. So we plunged into Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, and many others. Their plays remain vivid to me even now—not that Professor Satterthwaite was an especially good teacher. He was a digressive fellow who would meet his students at home in his private study while he sucked on his pipe and told stories, many of them with a blue tinge.

He drew a key distinction between what he called the “comedy of f___ and the comedy of s___.” Or to be a little more delicate, sex comedies and potty humor. He meant all comedy is one or the other. I have never been clear whether that’s a good distinction. (Can’t a comedy indulge both? Isn’t there anything else?) But I vividly remember how Professor Satterthwaite relished saying those two words. Of course, at age 17 I had heard them plenty of times before. I attended public school in Pittsburgh neighborhoods where everyday student vocabulary had more of the blast furnace than those two words. But I never heard them rolled trippingly from the tongue of a cultivated Englishman extolling fine literature. That was new. 

The genial and even more cultivated John McWhorter recently delivered a short and somewhat alarming book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. McWhorter teaches linguistics (and lots of other subjects, including music history) at Columbia University, but I think it safe to say he is best known as a linguist, and one who has charmed his way through 20 books and hundreds of essays. Nine Nasty Words continues his charm offensive—with emphasis on both those words. The charm he possesses is that of a relaxed and convivial conversationalist, a reincarnation or an avatar of the late Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite, but without the British affectation and with a great deal more to teach. He brings his credentials as a black American to the table but not in the fraught tone of claiming special insight. Of special insights he has plenty, but they reflect scholarship not racial privilege. But his charm offense does have an offensive part, and it too is also a bit Satterthwaitian: McWhorter delights in naughty words. Or at least most of them.

Donald Trump, Magnificent Vulgarian Andrew Blyth

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/review/2022/01/donald-trump-magnificent-vulgarian/

The 2016 US election was a turning point for the republic. Having tolerated presidents Barack Obama (Democrat, 2009-17) and George W. Bush (Republican, 2001-2009), and with Hillary Clinton (Democrat) offering more of the same, large swathes of the voting American middle class were desperate for change. They wanted to see a it in the way politics was done, and to stop being ignored by their elected representatives in Washington DC.

The election was a contest between former First Lady, senator and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (a Washington insider) and a trailblazing entertainment and construction businessman from New York with a fondness for disruption, Donald J. Trump. Voters, particularly those living in the Midwest, liked what Trump was offering: making America great again. Trump promised to be their agent for change. He was catering for the needs and aspirations of ordinary Americans, who felt they had been neglected for much too long. The ‘basket of deplorables’ (Clinton’s remark showing her disrespect for millions of hard-working Middle Americans), one in two women, and one in three Hispanics voted for the ultimate risk-taker. A new dawn was emerging in the United States. Trump was to embark on a program of reform – and he was in a hurry to ‘drain the swamp’ of the Washington insiders who looked after only themselves. Trump was soon to discover how entirely different it was campaigning from opposition to governing.

Political historians warn that commentary immediately after an event will never stand as the final word. Dispassionate historical analysis, it is often said, takes time. Written works explain and clarify decisions and events that the participants expect historians to consider when assessing political, economic, social or cultural events.

The rise and fall of the Trump presidency has been the subject of much commentary, mainly by a handful of active participants including academics, commentators, journalists, and Trump family members. Little has been written by those who have some perspective on the machinations of politics and government. To date, the Trump presidency has been the subject of terse political commentary more than measured historical assessment; but commentary is not history.

Donald Trump: The Ultimate Contrarian (Connor Court Publishing, 2021) is Richard Alston’s second foray in two years examining the principles and practice of public leadership, and he offers a scintillating read. Drawing on his time in politics, as a senator and senior minister in the Howard Government, and as a state and federal party leader, Alston ventures where others fear to tread – offering a critique of Trump’s presidency. With outstanding effect.

Woke Racism John H. McWhorter reveals how a new religion has betrayed Black America. Danusha V. Goska

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/woke-racism-danusha-v-goska/

John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He has also published in numerous prestigious outlets, and he is currently an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. McWhorter is the son of a college administrator father and a professor mother. He attended Friends Select School, a private, a 189-year-old college-preparatory institution. In short, McWhorter is a highly accomplished member of the American elite. He is black. A man should never be reduced to a skin color. But we live in, as the apocryphal Chinese curse is alleged to say, “interesting times,” and, so, yes, every mention of McWhorter’s new book Woke Racism may skip his many accomplishments, and focus on his color.

“I know quite well,” he writes, “that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they’re written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book … A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist.” As McWhorter notes, he is accused of being “not really black.”

McWhorter responds by reminding our Woke overlords, whom he calls “The Elect,” that their very ideology insists that every black man in America is living under the oppressive boot of white supremacy. The New York Times published at least one op-ed by a black professor who insisted that being a professor is no escape from America’s pervasive racism. Chris Lebron’s June 16, 2020 op-ed was entitled, “White America Wants Me to Conform. I Won’t Do It. Even at Elite Universities, I Was Exposed to the Disease that Has Endangered Black Lives for So Long.” So, yes, as McWhorter points out, by the Elect’s own value system, he is indeed “black enough.”

McWhorter has been producing necessary prose for decades; he should be required reading for American students. His essay entitled “Explaining the Black Education Gap” in Wilson Quarterly’s summer, 2000 issue, is one of the boldest pieces about education I’ve ever read. I wish I could require every one of our Woke overlords to read McWhorter’s June 11, 2020 piece in Quillette “Racist Police Violence Reconsidered.” 

Dark Thoughts from the Wife of Dr. Doom The NIH bioethics boss, a specialist in “human subjects” research, explains it all for you. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/nihlist-thought-dr-dooms-wife-christine-grady-lloyd-billingsley/

“This book was written by the author in her private capacity. Opinions expressed are her own. No official support or endorsement by the NINR [National Institute of Nursing Research] the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or other agencies is intended or should be inferred regarding the views presented here.”

Those are the first words a reader encounters in The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventative HIV Vaccine, by Christine Grady, from Indiana University Press back in 1995. In the acknowledgments, doubts begin to rise.

The author thanks “my mentor,” Georgetown professor Leroy Walters, along with several academics and medical doctors. Also mentioned are two officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the NIH, and Mary Ropka and others at the Clinical Therapeutics Laboratory at the NINR.

On the book’s final page, readers learn that “Christine Grady is Acting Clinical Director and Research Associate at the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institutes of Health,” the very agency that that supposedly offers no support or endorsement for Grady’s book, which is “dedicated to my family.”

How strange, then, that the author includes no acknowledgement for her husband, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom she married ten years earlier in 1985. Dr. Fauci shows up on page 55, his only named appearance, as the “director of NIAID,” conveniently enough, “the branch of the NIH primarily responsible for vaccine development.” His wife finds limited success in the development of vaccines against retroviral infections and sexually transmitted diseases, and acknowledges that “HIV is an STD.”

HIV is also “associated with social deviance,” but no reference to works such as How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, from 1983, or And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts and first published in 1987. Both works outline bathhouse culture and the widespread use of amyl and butyl nitrites, also known as “poppers” and their destructive effects on health. Grady also ignores The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, first published in 1990.

Grady does recall how the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) and other activists were “taking matters into their own hands.” In July of 1990, Dr. Anthony Fauci, announced that such activists would have representation on all committees and in all activities of NIAID’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG).