RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/nevergreen-victim-cancel-culture-strikes-back-daniel-greenfield/

“What? What was controversial?”
“It may not have been the words, per se. But your free speech created controversy.”
“Therefore it was controversial,” Luiz said.
From Nevergreen by Andrew Pessin.

7 years ago, Professor Andrew Pessin, a respected teacher of religion and philosophy at Connecticut College, criticized Hamas. Back then, cancel culture wasn’t the familiar buzzword that it is now, but when the local Students for Justice in Palestine affiliate and the college paper came after him, the college leadership sided with the mob and against their own professor.

Front Page Magazine took on the story back then, exposing the radical hate of the mob’s leaders. In the years that have passed, Pessin’s experiences have been replicated on campuses across the country. Social media mobs have spread beyond the campus, coming for ordinary people with the misfortune to appear on some social justice Twitter influencer’s radar.

And college campuses have only gotten crazier and more dangerous in the last 7 years.

Now, Andrew Pessin is back with Nevergreen. Though none of the events of the novel reproduce his own encounter with campus cancel culture (that would be life, not art), and there is no Nevergreen College (although there is an Evergreen College which was the epicenter of one of the worst radical campus meltdowns), Pessin’s novel distills the madness that has taken over campuses across the country in a still of literary satire that is all the more devastating because it’s so disarming.

There are the “atheists in the ‘Be Grateful God is Dead Club'” and a character is described as wearing “the official t-shirt of the campus tea shop, Chai Guevara, featuring the iconic image of the revolutionary leader sipping a mug of chai itself emblazoned with the Chai Guevara logo”.

A professor named “Peace” teaches conflict studies while making threats, and the students campaign for a wheelchair ramp for the high diving board.

“‘It’s for the principle, the principle of inclusion,” the earnest young woman explained when J. asked whether any wheelchair-bound person were likely to actually use the diving board.”

At Nevergreen College, 1984’s Two-Minutes-Hate is countered with an “official Two Minutes of Hate-Hate later this afternoon”. And Nevergreen’s protagonist J becomes its target.

“To help us prepare for our collective two minutes of hating hate, our Two-Minute Hate-Hate,” Corrie said solemnly, having memorized this part, “indeed to help us focus our energy on the hate we must hate, I present to you, my dear fellow haters of hate, the face of hate.”

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/08/11/how_progressives_rewrote_american_history_789058.html

America’s Founders understood that political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens. Progressives – rejecting the idea that any rights, including the right of consent to government, are natural – accept no such limits. Progressivism insists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution. Historical progress should be facilitated by experts dedicated to the expansion of the public sphere and political control – especially at the national level. As progressivism has grown into modern liberalism, the commitment to extra-constitutional “progress” is broadly shared across elite political, academic, legal, and religious circles. Politics is thus increasingly identified with a mix of activism, expertise, and the desire for “change.”

Progressivism insists that the principled American constitutionalism of fixed natural rights and limited and dispersed powers must be overturned and replaced by an organic, evolutionary model of the Constitution.

The progressive understanding of the American polity grew out of a transformation in American political thought that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This transformation stemmed from a confluence of ideas borrowed from Darwinism, pragmatism, and German idealism. Each of these philosophical systems rejected natural law and natural rights. They privileged inexorable historical evolution and change over continuity and fixity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, America’s intellectual classes, guided by these ideas, moved in lockstep. They scorned whatever they perceived to stand in the way of History’s march – especially the Founders’ Constitution and traditional Christianity. Government was understood to be unlimited in principle – and it certainly could not be limited by a dusty 18th-century Constitution based on the flawed theory of a fixed, and fallen, human nature. The most important forms of social, economic, and political progress came to be seen as depending on the state, and the manipulation by the state of measurable phenomena. Human flourishing was most often seen as an incident of politically engineered growth and transformation. As the idea of a formal Constitution disappeared as an object of study – and eventually of public veneration – so, too, did the realm of the private and the invisible. American Catholicism and Protestantism assimilated themselves to the progressive synthesis, in their calls for social solidarity through economic policy. Whether through the Catholic social thought of Fr. John Ryan (A Living Wage, 1906), or the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch (Christianizing the Social Order, 1913), significant portions of religious opinion turned against limited constitutionalism in the quest for more rational, just, and scientific state administration. This stood in contrast to the pre-progressive American Christianity that buttressed the constitutional order by linking human fallenness, or imperfection, to the need for political moderation, individual rights, personal responsibility, and limited government. Such assimilation of secular thought and theology to the aims of progressivism continues to have important ramifications.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-8-21-initial-reaction-to-charles-murrays-facing-reality

As you may be aware, Charles Murray is out with a new book, “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America.” I picked up a copy today. It’s not a long book, and I am already much of the way through it.

For those curious about how I got the book, I bought it at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Of course, they did not have it in stock. But they took my order, and after a couple of weeks, the book arrived, and I went over and bought it. (This is in contrast to Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage” which, although I ordered it about two months ago, somehow has still not arrived; and to Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally,” as to which, the clerk informed me, after studying his computer screen intently for several minutes, “we can’t get that.”)

The gist of Murray’s book is not complicated to summarize. The “two truths about race” that Murray refers to are, in the words of the Table of Contents, “race differences in cognitive ability,” and “race differences in violent crime.” Murray’s point is that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about race in America without recognizing the truths about the large differences between and among races on these two metrics.

Even as I was making my way through Murray’s book, I came across today, via Maggie’s Farm, a recent review of it at Quillette by a guy named Razib Khan. The guy who posted the link at Maggie’s to Khan’s piece, who goes by the name “The Barrister,” calls it “a thoughtful review.” But then Barrister says, “it seems unfair to expect Murray to offer solutions.” What Barrister refers to is this excerpt, which is the heart of Khan’s review:

Murray’s narrative suffers from a similar failing—it identifies problems, but leaves the vexing elaboration of innovative policy solutions to others. It drops the data at our feet like a ticking time-bomb, but the prescriptions to defuse the device are like an instruction without a manual.

Well, it’s a lot worse than just that it “seems unfair” to expect Murray to offer solutions. Can we just state here what should be obvious to everyone? — THERE DOES NOT EXIST ANY “INNOVATIVE POLICY SOLUTION” THAT IS GOING TO SOMEHOW “SOLVE” OR “FIX” THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AND AMONG RACES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY OR VIOLENT CRIME. Nor does there exist any “policy solution” (“innovative” or otherwise) that is going to solve or fix any time soon the differences in life outcomes between and among racial groups that flow from the two underlying truths that Murray identifies.

It just seems to be nearly universally accepted among our progressive elites that all human problems are subject to being promptly solved or fixed by having the government hire some group of self-proclaimed experts who will devise some “innovative policy solutions” and, with the added magic of infinite government resources, voila!, the problems will be solved. If somehow the first trillion dollars or ten trillion or a hundred trillion hasn’t fixed the problem, it must therefore be an issue of not having tried quite the right solution, or of not having been given enough funding.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hero-of-two-worlds-review-lafayette-american-revolution-11629475529?mod=article_inline

Most readers of The Wall Street Journal will recognize Lafayette by name. One of the few non-Americans counted among the heroes of the Revolution, dozens of American towns, counties and streets are named for him. But what of the niceties of the Marquis’s eventful life, spanning 1757 to 1834? Those who take up Mike Duncan’s comprehensive, birth-to-death biography will find this French-born nobleman, soldier and statesman to be a fascinating and paradoxical character. Fusing revolutionary energy with a tendency to seek moderation, even compromise, he was as extraordinary as the times in which he lived.

Mr. Duncan—famous for his podcasts “The History of Rome” and “Revolutions”—is the bestselling author of “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.” Now, in the three-part doorstopper “Hero of Two Worlds” he shows how a youthful, “restlessly defiant” Lafayette evolved into an even-tempered, moderate reformer, while always keeping true to his ideals. Lafayette early embraced the American Revolution (1776-83), later helped instigate the French Revolution (1789-99) and, later yet, encouraged France’s July Revolution (1830). Given his half-century of wide-ranging, trans-Atlantic activities, it is not surprising that Lafayette’s contemporaries and modern historians alike offer widely differing assessments of a career that thwarts easy summation.

Part I (1757-86) introduces Lafayette’s French context and unpacks his formidable role in the American Revolution. Born at the Château de Chavaniac, in Auvergne, the infant aristocrat was baptized Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier. Lafayette jested: “I was baptized like a Spaniard. But it was not my fault. And without pretending to deny myself the protection of Marie, Paul, Joseph, Roch and Yves, I more often called upon Saint Gilbert.” Independence would be Lafayette’s calling card, perhaps inevitably. When he was a toddler, his father died fighting in the Seven Years’ War. Lafayette’s only sibling, a younger sister, died too. With the death of his mother, in 1770, young Gilbert was orphaned, “left emotionally and psychologically alone in the world.” Still, resilient, he was commissioned an officer when 13. Great wealth helped too. Relocating to Versailles, he married into the powerful Noailles family and pursued a military career.

Mr. Duncan admits “it is hard to pin down the precise moment Lafayette latched on to the great ideas that animated the rest of his life: liberty, equality, and the rights of man.” By age 19, Lafayette had shed any “clumsy adolescence.” Having changed his coat-of-arms motto to “Cur Non” (“Why Not?”), in 1777 he sailed across the Atlantic seeking action in America’s War for Independence. Befriended by George Washington—the two maintained a lifelong friendship—he also “hit it off” with Alexander Hamilton, and others, like John Laurens and Thomas Jefferson.

Wrath: America Enraged Hardcover – October 12, 2021
by Peter W. Wood

https://www.amazon.com/Wrath-America-Peter-W-Wood/dp/1641772190/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=peter+wood&qid=1629058157&s=books&sr=1-4

Anger now dominates American politics. It wasn’t always so. “Happy Days Are Here Again” was FDR’s campaign song in 1932. By contrast, candidate Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign song was Mary J. Blige’s “Work That” (“Let ‘em get mad / They gonna hate anyway”). Both the left and right now summon anger as the main way to motivate their supporters. Post-election, both sides became even more indignant. The left accuses the right of “insurrection.” The right accuses the left of fraud. This is a book about how we got here―about how America changed from a nation that could be roused to anger but preferred self-control, to a nation permanently dialed to eleven.

Peter W. Wood, an anthropologist, has rewritten his 2007 book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America, which predicted the new era of political wrath. In his new book, he explains how American culture beginning in the 1950s made a performance art out of anger; how and why we brought anger into our music, movies, and personal lives; and how, having step by step relinquished our old inhibitions on feeling and expressing anger, we turned anger into a way of wielding political power. But the “angri-culture,” as he calls it, doesn’t promise happy days again. It promises revenge. And a crisis that could destroy our republic.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/obama_lies_cashill_corrects.html

In November 2020, Barack Obama released his newest memoir, A Promised Land.  Now, hot on his heels, comes Jack Cashill’s Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, a savvy and ever-diligent effort to prevent fake news from becoming fake history.

Unsurprisingly, many of Obama’s newly offered truths are woefully inconsistent with those he formerly foisted on us.  I’ve lost track of whether this is version 1.2, 2.1, or 3.0.  In any event, we have yet another layer of Obama’s ipse dixits to add to his earlier ones, undoubtedly also likewise intended to be gospel and therefore ineligible for further questioning.  (Fat chance!)  

Thankfully, truth warrior Jack Cashill, the original Obamologist, continues to remind us of the earlier versions that Obama provided so we can track the layers of obfuscation, the fake corrections, and stick with the only reality that can be documented so far.

Cashill’s book also provides the omitted context within which to evaluate Obama’s claims.  The thirty-plus chapters address such issues as the curiously still evolving purported facts of Obama’s childhood, the as yet unanswered questions about Obama’s birth date and location, and related smokescreens. 

https://newsblaze.com/thoughts/opinions/save-the-american-constitutional-republic-a-message-to-all-good-americans_181174/

The Biden government and the Democrat Party are modern slave owners. Their Marxist policies are modern enslavement of the American people. All good Americans who love and care about their country must help to save the American constitutional republic, because the Democrats are working to destroy it.

Democrat Slave Owners

We do not need to ride on their indoctrination policy through Critical Race Theory (CRT) history and the American slaves’ owners past because we are currently riding along with their wave of enslaving the American people’s through their behemoth Marxist government.

Radio host Mark Levin and the author of the book American Marxism is not a modern Spartacus, the gladiator who, along with Crixus, Gannicus, Castus, and Oenomaus, was one of the escaped slave leaders in the Third Servile War, a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. All sources about Spartacus agree that he was a former gladiator and an accomplished military leader.

BUT, through his loud public voice on radio, TV and books, Mark Levin makes it possible for all good Americans, those the Democrats call ‘deplorables’ and ‘Neanderthals’ to make an impact to thwart the Marxist Democrat Party (MDP) and save our beloved American Republic. For eternity American history books will tell our story – the SPARTACUS! – The story of those who rose up to save the Republic while shouting, “I AM SPARTACUS!”

What Levin Sees

Levin notes that Marxists have infiltrated American politics, education, and culture.