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BOOKS

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America Paperback – July 31, 2001 by John McWhorter

https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Race-Self-Sabotage-Black-America/dp/0060935936/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=ztyym&pf_rd_p=

Why do so many African Americans—even comfortably middle-class ones—continue to see racism as a defining factor in their lives?

Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, born at the dawn of the post-Civil Rights era, spent years trying to make sense of this question. In this book he dared to say the unsayable: racism’s ugliest legacy is the disease of defeatism that has infected Black America. Losing the Race explores the three main components of this cultural virus: the cults of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism that are making Black people their own worst enemies in the struggle for success. With Losing the Race, a bold new voice rises among Black intellectuals.

America’s Foreign Policy: A Century of Dangerous Illusions Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Thornton reveals the lethal consequences of not putting America first.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/americas-foreign-policy-century-dangerous-frontpagemagcom/

Frontpage Editors: The Freedom Center has just published a new pamphlet authored by Shillman Fellow and regular FrontPage columnist, Professor Bruce Thornton.

America’s Foreign Policy: A Century of Dangerous Illusions is a concise and powerfully-written essay on the failings of American foreign policy following a century of embracing the dangerous illusions of multinational agreements, globalist institutions, and the “rules-based international order.” 

By veering away from an unapologetically nationalist, “American First” agenda, the United States is sliding into decline in a world where dangerous adversaries threaten to surpass America in prosperity and power. 

America’s Foreign Policy: A Century of Dangerous Illusions will arm you with the insights to understand these threats and how we can recover a strong foreign policy that puts American interests first.

The pamphlet is available at the FPM store and can be ordered by clicking HERE.

Covid’s Three Blind Mice A new book reveals how the troika of Fauci, Birx, and Redfield hijacked America’s pandemic response. John Tierney

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-a-plague-upon-our-house-by-scott-atlas

How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies with terrible consequences? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant interest in scientific research or debate—and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.

Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster. A veteran medical researcher and health-policy analyst at the Hoover Institution, Atlas, a radiologist, joined the Task Force six months into the pandemic, after he had published estimates that lockdowns could ultimately prove more deadly than Covid.

Atlas expected to spend his time at the White House discussing scientific data and debating the best strategies for protecting public health. Instead, he found that the Task Force included “zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself.” Vice President Mike Pence chaired the Task Force, but Atlas says that Pence and the other members were regularly cowed into submission by three doctors who dominated from the start: Deborah Birx, the Task Force’s coordinator, along with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control.

New Book Exposes Fauci’s Mythological Scientific Acumen Jordan Schachtel

https://brownstone.org/articles/new-book-exposes-faucis-mythological-scientific-acumen/

I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Dr. Scott Atlas’s new book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” which comes out on December 7.

In reading the account from his tenure inside of the Trump Administration’s COVID response team, acting as something similar to 45’s “COVID czar,” I was repeatedly struck by the seeming lack of intellectual capacity possessed by Anthony Fauci. I have certainly heard the rumors and seen Fauci’s public persona on display, and in his book, Atlas removes all doubt about Anthony Fauci the man. He confirms the clear reality that Fauci is just not a very bright person.

Like most career government bureaucrats, the routinely labeled “nation’s top infectious disease expert” does not live up to his corporate press and ruling class identity. Similar to his colleagues in Government Health, Fauci reveals himself as a midwit in his very best moments, but those moments do not occur in anything resembling a scientific proving ground.

Rather, Fauci and his compatriots flourish in Washington, D.C. because they are masters of media manipulation and the federal government bureaucracy. According to Dr. Atlas, Fauci, routinely exposed his lack of intellectual capacity and scientific expertise.

In one such White House COVID Task Force meeting, Atlas discloses that Fauci could not pronounce a medical term, while claiming that it was a proven and worrying symptom of COVID-19.

Atlas writes:

I politely listened as Dr. Fauci spoke about the study. He quickly jumped to what he often did—the alarmist interpretation of “how dangerous this virus is.” He then moved to other things “we don’t know,” speculating about potential problems from this virus. He then garbled out something that was almost unrecognizable. He had grossly mispronounced a medical term.

I leaned forward, struck by what I heard. I interrupted. “What did you just say?” He stopped immediately, frozen. No reply.

I repeated my question. “What did you just say? What are you trying to pronounce?” Fauci just looked at me. The room was silent. Then I said, “Are you trying to say encephalomyelitis?”

The ‘Islamophobia’ Industry’s Attempt to Shut Down All Criticism of Islam

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/11/the-islamophobia-industrys-attempt-to-shut-down-all-criticism-of-islam

BY CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

In Diane Weber Bederman’s latest book, The Islamophobia Industry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West, she provides an essential reality check about the “Islamophobia” industry’s aim to shut down all criticism of Islam, while propagating the irrational and damaging view of Islam as a “race.”

By now, it should be well understood that freedom of expression in free societies incorporates the right to offend. One does not have the same right to offend Islam and Muslim sensibilities in Sharia states, or even in many majority-Muslim countries. In the current era, the Muslim Brotherhood, supported by its affiliates and Islamic countries such as Qatar, has infiltrated free societies at every level, working to instill a fear of criticizing the Islamic ideology. Diane Bederman effectively points out that by means of an “islamophobia” industry that is handsomely funded from abroad, there is an aggressive push to silence anyone who criticizes or questions any aspect of Islam.

Bederman’s book explains how the “Islamophobia” industry has managed to insidiously dominate the anti-racism network, attempting to turn Islam, a religion and a political ideology, into a race. She also warns about the manipulation of lawfare in order to stop criticism of Islam which is deemed “offensive,” “racist,” and “hateful,” and thus contrary to human rights.

Diane Weber Bederman is a multifaith-endorsed, hospital-trained chaplain with a background in science and the humanities. She is a columnist and blogger who is passionate about religion, ethics, politics, and mental health. She is also the author of The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil and Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values. I had a few questions of my own for Ms Bederman:

Peter W. Wood :One Angry Nation, Two Wildly Divergent Explanations

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/29/one-angry-nation-two-wildly-divergent-explanations/

A review of Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury , by Evan Osnos

Osnos provides no insight at all into what is really happening among those of us who see ourselves as opposing a tide of illegitimate cultural authority backed by unfounded state power.

We Americans have become an angry bunch. On that Evan Osnos and I agree. Osnos is a staff writer for the New Yorker whose new book, Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury, surveys some of the same territory as my new book, Wrath: America Enraged. But on why we are angry and what it all means, Osnos and I diverge. Osnos sees in contemporary America “the failure of that mythology” that bound us together in “moral commitment, including the rule of law, the force of truth, and the right to pursue a better life.” I see in contemporary America not a failure of myth, but a change in character in which an older culture of self-restraint has given way to forceful expression. 

Osnos, whose other works include a flattering campaign biography of Joe Biden, blames ordinary Americans for indulging in a prolonged temper tantrum that has no real justification. My view to the contrary is that ordinary Americans are responding to the emergence of a ruling class whose contempt for them and for American civilization is nearly comprehensive. It is not that faith in “the rule of law, the force of truth, and the right to pursue a better life” has faltered. It is that faithful Americans now face the lawless use of state power, a duplicitous media, and rent-seeking by global elites. 

Osnos’ book is woven together of vivid tales of individuals in Greenwich, Connecticut (Osmos’ hometown); Clarksburg, West Virginia (where he had once worked for the local newspaper); and Chicago. He injects into almost all these stories his own disdain for the kinds of people who supported the Tea Party and eventually Donald Trump. The historical arc of Wildland is from the shock of 9/11 to the “insurrection” of January 6. He pauses at one point mid-book to observe:

Trump, the Tea Party, the NRA—they all made use of that rising unease of Americans who could not quite put a name to the anxieties they felt about the disordering of their world, about the puncturing of American invincibility, the browning of America, the vanishing of jobs to automation, the stagnation of their incomes. The language of force gained ground, Sarah Palin, in her appearances at Tea Party rallies and online, made frequent use of metaphors from the Revolutionary War and the world of guns. ‘Don’t retreat, reload,’ she liked to say.

A President Betrayed by Bureaucrats: Scott Atlas’s Masterpiece on the Covid Disaster By Jeffrey A. Tucker

https://brownstone.org/articles/a-president-betrayed-by-bureaucrats-scott-atlass-masterpiece-on-the-covid-disaster/

I’m a voracious reader of Covid books but nothing could have prepared me for Scott Atlas’s A Plague Upon Our House, a full and mind-blowing account of the famed scientist’s personal experience with the Covid era and a luridly detailed account of his time at the White House. The book is hot fire, from page one to the last, and will permanently affect your view of not only this pandemic and the policy response but also the workings of public health in general. 

Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment. 

Anyone who tells you this fictional story deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world. 

“Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,” he writes, “exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.”

In the midst of continued chaos, in August 2020, Atlas was called by Trump to help, not as a political appointee, not as a PR man for Trump, not as a DC fixer but as the only person who in nearly a year of unfolding catastrophe had a health-policy focus. He made it clear from the outset that he would only say what he believed to be true; Trump agreed that this was precisely what he wanted and needed. Trump got an earful and gradually came around to a more rational view than that which caused him to wreck the American economy and society with his own hands and against his own instincts. 

The Biden Family’s Corruption Inc -Mark Powell

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/books-authors/2021/11/the-biden-familys-corruption

Miranda Devine’s Laptop from Hell (Post Hill Press, 2021) is a riveting read. Indeed, following Hunter Biden’s misadventures and the mainstream media’s attempts to ignore and, indeed, suppress his abandoned hard drive’s revelations is akin watching a train wreck. You just can’t look away. Devine writes with such clarity and concision that the 200-plus pages and 21 chapters can be easily digested in not much more than a single sitting.

At any other moment in modern history, the laptop’s contents would have been the journalistic scoop that defines a journalist’s career. But such is the world we live in that, even with the publication of this book, much of the world’s media will ignore both its contents and the reek of corruption at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. As seen throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, modern newsrooms take it as their duty to deep-six anything that reflects badly on Democrats. As blogger and wit David ‘Iowa Hawk’ Burge  puts it, ‘journalism’s responsibility is to cover stories — with a pillow until they stop moving.’

The first question that will occur to every reader is the most obvious: How could Hunter Biden, someone with so much to hide, hand over his personal computer to a third party and then lose track of it?

To understand why, you really need to read the final chapter of Laptop from Hell first. As unbelievable as it may sound, on April 12, 2019, Hunter Biden brought one of three laptops to repairer Mac Isaac. Biden signed them over and provided his personal phone number and email address. Significantly, as Devine notes, it “would be confirmed as a match with his signatures on other documents”.

I Can’t Breathe David Horowitz delivers a tour de force. Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/i-cant-breathe-jason-d-hill/

Consider the following facts outlined in David Horowitz’s new book, I Can’t Breathe: How A Racial Hoax is Killing America:

Every year, more than 10 million arrests are made by police departments nationally. In 2019, 14 unarmed blacks and 25 unarmed whites were killed by police. A 2001 Justice Department report stated that “when a white officer kills a felon, that felon is usually a white…and when a black officer kills a felon that felon is usually a black.” Nothing has changed in the years since then, the report states.

Autopsy reports show that George Floyd could not breathe at the time of his containment by police because of the lethal dose of fentanyl that he had voluntarily ingested into his system.

A 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics study showed that of all suspects killed by police from 2003 to 2009, 41.7 percent were white, and 31.7 percent were black. In this period, blacks accounted for 38.5 percent of all arrests for violent crimes—that is, the type of crime most likely to trigger potentially deadly confrontation with police.

Horowitz further points out that the evidence that police do not shoot and kill African Americans in disproportionately high numbers has grown stronger. In 2017, blacks were arrested for 37.5 percent of all violent felonies, but were just 24.7 percent of people killed by police. Corresponding figures in 2018 were 37.4 percent and 26.4 percent. In 2019, the numbers were 36.4 percent and 29.3 percent.

Wilfred M. McClay: Review of Tucker Carlson’s book “The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism”

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/11/tucker-carlson-class-traitor

The Long Slide: Thirty Years in American Journalism

Tucker Carlson has become such a fixture in the world of cable-television news that it’s easy to forget he began his journalistic career as a writer. And a very good one at that, as this wide-ranging and immensely entertaining selection of essays from the past three decades serves to demonstrate. Carlson’s easygoing, witty, and compulsively readable prose has appeared everywhere from The Weekly Standard (where he was on staff during the nineties) to the New York Times, the Spectator, Forbes, New Republic, Talk, GQ, Esquire, and Politico, which in January 2016 published Carlson’s astonishing and prophetic article titled “Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right.” That essay has been preserved for posterity in these pages, along with twenty-two other pieces, plus a bombshell of an introduction written expressly for the occasion. More of that in a moment. 

The first response of many of today’s readers, particularly those who don’t like the tenor of Carlson’s generally right-populist politics or the preppy swagger and bubbly humor of his TV persona, will be to dismiss The Long Slide as an effort to cash in on the author’s current notoriety by recycling old material to make a buck. That was my assumption when I first opened this collection. But the book has an underlying unity, and a serious message. It evokes a bygone age, an era of magazine and newspaper journalism that seems golden in retrospect, and is now so completely gone that one must strain to imagine that it ever existed at all. The simple fact is that almost none of these essays could be published today, certainly not in the same venues: They are full of language and imagery and a certain brisk cheerfulness toward their subject matter that could not possibly pass muster with the Twittering mob of humorless and ignorant moralists who dictate the editorial policies of today’s elite journalism. 

Carlson’s writing style reflects the influence of the New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who brought a jaunty, whiz-bang you-are-there narrative verve and high-spirited drama to the task of telling vividly detailed stories about unusual people and places, generally relating them in the first person. Carlson’s prose is not as spectacular as Wolfe’s or as thrillingly unhinged as Thompson’s. But it has its own virtues, being crystal clear, conversational, direct, and vigorous, never sending a lardy adjective to do the work of a well-chosen image, and never using gimmicky wild punctuation or stretched-out words to fortify a point. He’s a blue-blazer and button-down-collar guy, not a compulsive wearer of prim white suits or a wigged-out drug gourmand wearing a bucket hat and aviator glasses. But many of Carlson’s writings give the same sense of reporting as an unfolding adventure, a traveling road show revolving around the reactions and experiences of the author himself.