RUTHFULLY YOURS

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:

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. 

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.

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. 

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/22/friedman-freedom-and-the-road-to-serfdom/

I just came across and article which reminded me that Nov. 16 was the 15th anniversary of the death of Milton Friedman, one of the past century’s greatest advocates of freedom. As someone who has followed his writing for most of my adult life, I can barely believe he has been gone that long. On the other hand, the abyss between the freedom he advocated and the world we now inhabit is so vast, I can barely believe he has only been gone that long.

That great gap makes me believe that now would be a good time to think back to some of Friedman’s insightful words. But his prolific output makes it hard to choose (rather than “Free to Choose“) among them when faced with limited space. How much further we have moved along what Friedrich Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom” since then, however, suggests one good source – Friedman’s “Introduction” to the University of Chicago Press’ 50th anniversary edition of the book.

The promotion of collectivism is combined with the profession of individualist values.

Individualism … can be achieved only in a liberal order in which government activity is limited primarily to establishing the framework within which individuals are free to pursue their own objectives.

The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovering for achieving participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, the relation between the ends and the means remains widely misunderstood. Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives support collectivist means without recognizing the contradiction.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/11/china-and-covid-dancing-with-the-devil/

“Markson’s brilliant investigation leaves us confident enough that Beijing did not deliberately release SARS-CoV-2 upon the world. Once the virus was out there, though, and once the regime had regained its nerve, Beijing did everything in its power to turn an international crisis of their making into a victory. That is the phenomenon we are dealing with here. One of the more admirable figures to emerge in What Really Happened in Wuhan is Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, along with several key White House advisers including Peter Navarro. Though all very different in their expertise and character, common to them all is the understanding that engaging in any kind of relationship with the CCP really is akin to dancing with the devil.”

The potential readership for Sharri Markson’s new book increased in June after American television celebrity Jon Stewart shared his views with a left-of-centre audience on the origins of COVID-19: “Novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who could we ask? The Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think?” Not too weird, according to Newsweek magazine, for the viewers who pushed back on social media with ripostes such as: “Honestly can’t tell if Jon Stewart was joking or had a senior moment on Colbert”; “Jon Stewart is flying real close to QAnon territory. Expecting him to go anti-vax any moment now”; and, of course, “like wow, way to throw more gas on the fire of anti-Asian hate”. Stewart’s detractors, though unlikely to be aware of it, were essentially conveying the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Why? Beyond everything else, Markson’s book makes a good start at answering that question as well.

In the first instance, though, What Really Happened in Wuhan establishes the high plausibility of the so-called “lab-leak” theory. It is more than a tinfoil-hat conspiracy dreamed up by the Trump administration, white supremacists, xenophobes, the Murdoch press, anti-Chinese bigots, Cold Warriors and so on—or what Hillary Clinton, in another context, would refer to as a “vast right-wing conspiracy”. One of the many intellectual tragedies of the Cold War was the tendency to conflate anti-communism (or anti-totalitarianism) with a
reactionary worldview. A resultant problem was the inability or refusal of self-styled sophisticated observers from the West to grasp the essential despotism of Soviet society, which existed even in what we might now call Late Communism. Revisionist historians, for instance, went out of their way to amplify the non-tyrannical aspects of everyday life in the Soviet empire to argue a broader point: the internal social and political dynamics of a Western society, though obviously different from a communist one, were of a piece.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/16/new-book-reveals-organization-controls-black-lives-matter/

Editor’s note: What follows is an excerpt from Charles Love’s “Race Crazy: BLM, 1619, And The Progressive Racism Movement.” 

If Black Lives Matter is the chaos arm of the movement, the Movement for Black Lives is the operating system. How a group so connected, so influential, and so well-funded can operate with no exposure in the age of social media is both a testament to its power and a sad statement of how far the media has fallen.

It would be so much simpler to have one or two organizations with chapters throughout the country. It would result in easier fundraising and better messaging. But the Black Lives Matter movement is a complicated web of connected groups.It is basically a race-based Ponzi scheme.

…

The most interesting thing about Black Lives Matter is not their IRS status; it is the fact that there is no longer a
Black Lives Matter organization. They maintain a page and the means to accept donations, and that is really all that remains of the original organization. Black Lives Matter is largely controlled by the Movement for Black Lives and Black Lives Matter Global Foundation.

For several months, the country has been beset by protests and riots. It is obvious that they are organized, but many believe they are being funded by the Black Lives Matter movement or others with political interests. There is no doubt that funds are being used to fuel the protests, agitate against the police, and support rioting and looting. That people dealing with the uncertainty of employment during the COVID-19 crisis would use their limited savings to travel around the country to protest, risk arrest, and meet the subsequent cash bail, merely in order to throw a rock at a police officer, is as likely as a spontaneous uprising in Benghazi.

The question is: Who is funding these protests, particularly the clashes with police? After being attacked by the Republican National Convention protestors, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul called for an investigation to trace the corporations funding the protests and riots. I agree with the sentiment, but I believe it will be nearly impossible to trace. There are so many organizations within the movement, most of which have no financial declarations or lists of their members.

And even if Black Lives Matter activists are funding the riots, there is a good chance that no one at the donor level
knows. The BLM movement has a decentralized, bottom-up structure. As I have pointed out, the movement is really a collection of many groups with a common enemy. If you are fighting racism, capitalism, immigration, or any gender issue, you are welcome. Similarly, there is no true leader. Each group operates independently of each other, and each group is made up of leaderless individuals.