RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe by Dr. Voddie T. Baucham, Jr., is the number one bestseller in its category in Amazon as of this writing in early August, 2021. The book was released in April, and yet it already has five thousand customer reviews, 94% of which award the book five-stars. Given that Fault Lines is not receiving the kind of major-media, saturation coverage that a bestseller might expect, many of those thousands of reviews are fueled by enthusiastic word-of-mouth.

Fault Lines deserves its phenomenal success. Don’t let its “Evangelical” subtitle fool you. I’m no Evangelical, but I will happily join my five-star review to the thousands of others. Baucham’s presentation of the history and current profile of critical theory is accessible to all readers. Even non-Christians can benefit from understanding how the majority faith of Americans is being corrupted. Finally, as a Christian, Baucham offers hope for the future. Even non-Christians can apply some of Baucham’s recommendations.

Fault Lines is one of many recent books struggling to take readers by the hand and guide them through our current cultural moment, of pupils suddenly being asked to inform their teachers of their “preferred pronouns,” of toppling statues, burning cities, and careers ruined by one suspect utterance. Fault Lines belongs on the same bookshelf as James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody, as well as Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. Cynical Theories goes into greater detail on the roots of today’s hysteria, and its authors are Christophobic atheists who hold up a vague and unhistorical notion of “The Enlightenment” as our salvation. Douglas Murray, a former Christian and current atheist, appears to despair of any hope; rather, he’s given to dire prognostications: “The US is on the brink of Civil War;” Murray has said; the Western world is “standing on the precipice” of cultural annihilation.

Voddie T. Baucham has one up on Lindsey, Pluckrose, and Murray. Yes, Baucham recognizes how bad things are. “The United States is on the verge of a race war, if not a complete cultural meltdown,” Baucham predicts. But Baucham offers hope, and he offers healing. He finds both in Christian faith. Again, though, you don’t have to be a Christian to benefit from reading Fault Lines.

Fault Lines is very reader-friendly. Lindsey and Pluckrose offer much more detailed and academic surveys of how Marxism’s twisted evolution lead to the concept of “microaggressions” and social media videos in which obese women insist that if you aren’t sexually attracted to them you are a bigot. Like those authors, Baucham also introduces his reader to influential progenitors of Woke like Antonio Gramsci, Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Peggy McIntosh, but more briefly. Clearly, Baucham exhibits the Evangelical’s zeal to reach the maximum audience with the deepest truths, while never allowing academic jargon to get in the way. This is a book you could understand even if you were reading it in a noisy and crowded subway car. Its ease of reading in no way diminishes its profundity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/inclusive-exclusivity-bruce-bawer/

At a time when our elites have decided that absolutely everything in American society comes down to the supposedly fraught, brutal, and never-ending power relationship between oppressive whites and oppressed blacks – and where, according to Critical Race Theory, white-on-black racism must constantly and tirelessly be rooted out, challenged, denounced, and vigorously countered with anti-racist actions, statements, and preferences in accordance with the semi-literate but apparently divinely inspired directives of Ibram X. Kendi and his ilk – where do Asians fit in?

There’s no such question about Latinos and Native Americans, who, being recognized victim groups, can be pretty tidily bundled in with blacks on the “oppressed” side of the ledger. But Asians? Increasingly, Asians are seen as “white-adjacent.” Yes, many Asians have had it bad. Real bad. (Of course, we’re using “Asian” here not in the euphemistic way Brits do – to mean, mostly, Pakistanis and other Muslims from Southwest Asia – but in the American sense, to refer primarily to Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and other East Asians.) As Xu reminds us, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the only piece of legislation of its kind in American history, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was without parallel. Many Asian immigrants to the U.S., moreover, have experienced poverty and oppression in their homelands beyond the imagining of even the poorest and most downtrodden American of any skin color.

But somehow their suffering doesn’t count. While blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans receive a leg-up in college admissions, job hirings, and other such circumstances, Asians don’t. On the contrary, the same systems that are rigged in favor of those other groups tend to be rigged against Asians – often to a grotesque degree. As Kenny Xu records in his definitive new book An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy, an Asian student wanting to get into Harvard in 2009 (and the injustice certainly hasn’t disappeared since then) “had to score an astounding 450 points higher on a 1600-point SAT test than a Black student to have the same chance of admission.” Of course, when affirmative action started, it was supposed to make up for slavery and its aftermath. But if that’s the premise, then why do Latinos also get a boost? Presumably because as a group they’ve known suffering and oppression. Why not Asians, then?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/it_cant_happen_here_it_emisem_happening_here.html

Sinclair Lewis’s novel of 1935, It Can’t Happen Here, was published amid the rise of fascism in Europe. The book is about the political career of fictional Buzz Windrip, who is elected President in 1936, defeating FDR with a campaign promising a return to traditional values, drastic social and economic reforms (he promises every American $5k).  Once elected, he becomes a totalitarian tyrant complete with his own paramilitary force called the Minute Men!  

Windrip is Lewis’s version of an American Hitler and/or Mussolini.  But consider the parallels with the current occupant of the Oval Office. Windrip outlaws dissent (consider the Biden administration’s partnership with big tech to censor opposing opinions). He, Windrip, imprisons his critics just as Biden has jailed anyone present at the Capitol on January 6. Biden has his own Minute Men, the FBI as well a couple of other paramilitary groups in service of his agenda – Antifa and BLM.  They are his shock troops that, like Windrip’s thugs, terrorize his opponents, freedom-loving, independent thinking Americans.  

Like Biden, Buzz Windrip abrogated the rights of civilians and divided the nation into “administrative sectors” to be managed by federal “Corpo” authorities and enforced by his Minute Men.  Pelosi is now installing branches of the Capitol Police throughout the country to seek out perceived threats to members of Congress.  The similarities to Lewis’s two-dimensional dictator and the Biden regime are chilling. 

As in the novel, opponents of the Obama/Biden regime have  been found guilty until proven innocent of un-committed crimes, from Gen. Michael Flynn to Roger Stone, to anyone who worked for Trump to the 1/6 protesters, by corrupt judges in kangaroo courts whipped up by a manic, historically ignorant media that loathe anyone or anything remotely conservative or constitutional.  Viciously opposed to Donald Trump, the mainstream media covered for the massive crimes against the nation that were occurring from the day Trump became the Republican presidential candidate.  The left invented the Russia collusion narrative out of thin air.  It was pursued as legitimate by the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA and our despicable journalist class.  All of them very likely knew it was false from the outset, but they all colluded to damage a President who actually meant to represent the people, not just the ruling elite.  The swamp, left and right, was threatened and fought back with the ferocity of a cornered animal. With the 2020 election, they think they’ve won, but have they?

This quote from Lewis’ book perfectly describes Joe Biden:  

“The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.  Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.” 

Indeed.  Biden cannot utter a coherent sentence.  He is the face of a corrupt band of radicals who, along with Obama, vowed to “transform America.”  He was fraudulently installed and has little actual personal support.  The Trump presidency rendered the left well and truly deranged, without any moral compunctions going forward.  The man and his supporters had to be destroyed just like Lewis’s Buzz Windrip’s opponents had to be ruined.

The protagonist in Sinclair’s novel is a journalist, Doremous Jessup, who founds an organization to fight Windrip’s destructive policies.  He founds a newspaper and publishes accounts of Windrip’s abuses. Jessup’s counterparts in our alternative media are the champions of truth and there are more and more of them every day.  Big tech tries to silence them, but they are proliferating faster than they can censor them.   The massive, life-long corruption of the Biden family is now a known fact.  The depravity of Biden’s son Hunter has been revealed.  The corruption at the DOJ and FBI is being exposed.  It was the FBI that set up the fake kidnapping attempt of Gretchen Whitmer and perhaps even had a hand in orchestrating the event of January 6.  The truth will out. 

The radical Democrat media of today ignores the crimes and abuses of power by leftists but the Doremus Jessups of 2021 America do not.  The truth is out there despite the suppression tactics of this administration, its handmaidens in the media and big tech.  Like the villain of the novel, Biden has incarcerated hundreds of non-violent  people who were present at the Capitol on 1/6.  The DOJ calls them “enemies of the state,”  their protest an insurrection.  

But not one of them was armed; none have been charged with insurrection.  They are being held without bail while the hundreds of rioters/looters/arsonists of the summer of 2020 are free as birds.  This is the stuff of communist China, the Soviet Union, Venezuela and Castro’s Cuba.  Sinclair Lewis, like Orwell and Huxley, knew of what they wrote.  Tyrants are with us always and when they get power are lethal. “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  – Charles Peguy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/asians_are_the_lefts_inconvenient_minority_.html

“There are dark stains on the history of this nation,” writes Kenny Xu in the preface of his groundbreaking new book, ‘An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.’ But the purpose of Xu’s relevant and timely book is not to condemn America for its past, but to celebrate America for its triumphs.

Xu continues to say that “we should be proud to have made so much progress in mostly, though not completely, overcoming…”

The chief concern in America today is not how much further we have to go to fulfill our original charter of freedom and equality for all, but just how far we have regressed in recent years from achieving this end. Americans fought a bloody Civil War to right the wrong of slavery. Americans fought a non-violent Civil Rights Movement to end race based segregation and discrimination. 

Despite these important achievements, all that progress is being undone and at a rapid rate. Xu identifies the root cause of America’s rapid regression, writing, “the attack on Asian-American excellence represents the decline of a larger concept in American society that has allowed its culture of excellence to prosper: meritocracy.”

Xu achieves two critical things with his book: he simultaneously shines a spotlight on the disturbing and unsung attacks against Asian-Americans, while also explaining how this is ushering in the decline of America, as a whole.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/who-was-karl-marx-daniel-greenfield/

Karl Marx is over two centuries old. Ideas that used to be radical have long since become stale. Socialism is about as new and exciting as the telegraph or Bernie Sanders. Marxism is most likely to be studied in the countries where, as its proponents claim, it’s never really been tried.

Who was Karl Marx beyond the bearded guy on t-shirts in Berkeley and Austin?

In Who Was Karl Marx?: The Men, the Motives and the Menace Behind Today’s Rampaging American Left, investigative journalist James Simpson paints a scathing picture of Marx, his disciplines, and the political movement created by the fake prophet of a real catastrophe.

Marx was “hypocritically greedy, petty, arrogant, lazy, selfish, dishonest, two-faced, lecherous, bigoted and brimming with hatred”, Simpson writes, backing that up with historical anecdotes.

Does it matter that Marx was a virulent bigot, that he hated most people, and even sired an illegitimate son, kept him in poverty, and never let him go past the servants’ quarters?

It might not matter if Marx were just a writer whose work was disconnected from his loathsome personality, but Simpson convincingly argues that, “progressivism’s end  product  is merely the  reflection of Marx’s personality, played out to devastating effect on the world stage.”

Marxism, in other words, is terrible because Karl Marx was a miserable human being.

The same holds true for much of the Left. Its theories don’t just fail because they’re poorly thought out, but because they’re expressions of malice directed at the rest of the world.

But Who Was Karl Marx? is not a biography of Marx, so much as it’s a sketch of key leftist figures, and the influence of their ideas on the present. The book may begin with Marx, but it goes on to Black Lives Matter and Antifa. It touches on Lenin’s obsession with destroying his opponents through relentless dehumanization and smear campaigns in order to clarify the contemporary leftist obsession with political correctness and cancel culture.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/how_barack_obama_begot_gwen_berry.html

“I never said that I hated the country,” said Gwen Berry, the world’s most famous hammer thrower — male, female or non-binary. “All I said was I respect my people enough to not stand or acknowledge something that disrespects them. I love my people point blank, period.”

Berry, who finished third in the female hammer throw at the U.S. track and field Olympic Trials, was attempting to explain why she turned her back on the National Anthem. If her subversive pout appalled half of America, it surprised no one. In the year 2021, sports fans have come to expect athletes, black and white, to disrespect symbols of national pride.

It didn’t use to be this way. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, race relations were better than they had ever been. As to athletic protests, it had been forty years since any Olympian grabbed the kind of attention Berry got.

At the 1968 Olympics, 200-meter medalists Tommy Smith and John Carlos famously gave a black power salute while the Anthem played. Unlike Berry, however, they at least had something to bitch about, Smith having grown up in the Jim Crow South and Carlos having been schooled there.

Berry had no idea what she was protesting. Born in a St. Louis suburb in 1989, she likely cast her first presidential vote for a black man. She may have even believed Obama’s insistence that there “is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

The more salient question is whether Obama believed it. If he did, he did not believe it deeply enough to resist the pressure he faced from the left’s old school race hustlers and new school critical race theorists. Clearly intimidated, he made a decision in March 2012 that committed the Democratic Party to the corrosive madness of identity politics for the foreseeable future.