RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-charles-murrays-new-book-is-his

I come not to bury Charles Murray, but not to praise him, either.

He has a new book out, Facing Reality. It’s a doozy.

His books have a way of being doozies, going up against ideas sacred to the American intelligentsia on race as well as class.

He is also one of America’s most brilliant thinkers.

To many familiar with Murray’s work, I have already revealed myself as a “racist” in engaging his work at all, and/or not calling him one.

However, Murray’s work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as “racist,” except by people whose definition of “racist” is “That which people of the black American race don’t like for any reason.”

Rather: I salute Murray’s brilliance while being disturbed by many of his arguments. What many will call racism is what I call being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

* * *

Yet Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.

Those who on some level celebrate the latter as black people getting back at the white man in the only way they can, should know that the facts don’t lend themselves to that vigilante justice analysis. More specifically, black people kill each other more than members of other groups kill each other.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/fauci-allegedly-resisted-trump-directive-cancel-virus-research-grant

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infections disease expert, resisted a directive from President Trump to cancel a research grant for a non-profit that was linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a new book detailing the Trump administration’s handling of COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump issued a directive to Fauci and the National Institutes of Health in April 2020 to cut funding for a study examining how coronaviruses jump from infected bats to humans after it was reportedly linked to the lab in Wuhan, suspected of having leaked the virus.

The exchange between Fauci and the White House is detailed in an upcoming book by Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta called “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” according to Fox News.

The study’s sponsor, EcoHealth Alliance, was then told to end the remaining $369,819 balance of its 2020 grant.

According to the book, on April 2020, Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins received notice that Trump wanted to cancel the grant. Fauci and Collins resisted, telling the White House they “were not sure the NIH actually had the authority to terminate a peer-reviewed grant in the middle of a budget cycle.” 

ttps://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/it-is-just-hype-to-call-electism

Some think it’s just that I don’t like religion and haven’t studied it. And they’re right. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t watched a religion emerge since last year.

I am flattered to see that a person or two out there has actually taken it upon themselves to review my postings of excerpts from my The Elect, as if it were already an actual book. And from these reviews, I can see what a major strain in reviews of the actual book, Woke Racism (out from Portfolio in October) will be. I will be roundly slammed for seeming disrespectful of religion, and for not knowing enough about it to sully it with a comparison to Elect ideology.

I get it. I can see how insufferable I will seem in my take on religion, despite that Woke Racism will pull considerably back on the tone I often took in The Elect. I am, indeed, an atheist. Not an agnostic, but an atheist. And I openly admit that religious commitment perplexes and sometimes even irritates me. It’s partly a matter of personal history.

Want a bit of that dirt? First, the fact that many black Americans are devoutly Christian puts a barrier between them and me that I wish weren’t there. Second, it kept me from being able to share much of my life with a very good childhood friend when he decided to embrace an especially conservative branch of Christianity.

However, those biases acknowledged, my point that Electism has become a religion stands. My point is that religion typically includes a wing of belief that must stand apart from empiricism, that at a certain point one must just “believe.” This is not to dismiss the reams of profound, cosmopolitan close reasoning that theology has produced over the millennia, nor is to dismiss devout people as unintelligent.

Rather, it would seem to me that religious belief requires a person to sequester a part of their cognition for a kind of belief that is not based on logic. Yes, the theologian can slice and dice brilliantly in seeking a rational basis for the faith – but at a certain point, you hit that wall: one must “just” believe, “take that jump and” believe, one must believe … “.. (I don’t know) …”.

My point about The Elect is that its ideology involves – and actually is founded significantly upon – that type of religious thought.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-vivek-ramaswamy-put-wokeism-out-of-business-11624649588?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A self-made multimillionaire who founded a biotech company at 28, Vivek Ramaswamy is every inch the precocious overachiever. He tells me he attended law school while he was in sixth grade. He’s joking, in his own earnest manner. His father, an aircraft engineer at General Electric, had decided to get a law degree at night school. Vivek sat in on the classes with him, so he could keep his dad company on the long car rides to campus and back—a very Indian filial act.

“I was probably the only person my age who’d heard of Antonin Scalia, ” Mr. Ramaswamy, 35, says in a Zoom call from his home in West Chester, Ohio. His father, a political liberal, would often rage on the way home from class about “some Scalia opinion.” Mr. Ramaswamy reckons that this was when he began to form his own political ideas. A libertarian in high school, he switched to being conservative at Harvard in “an act of rebellion” against the politics he found there. That conservatism drove him to step down in January as CEO at Roivant Sciences—the drug-development company that made him rich—and write “Woke, Inc,” a book that takes a scathing look at “corporate America’s social-justice scam.” (It will be published in August.)

Mr. Ramaswamy recently watched the movie “Spotlight,” which tells the story of how reporters at the Boston Globe exposed misconduct (specifically, sexual abuse) by Catholic priests in the early 2000s. “My goal in ‘Woke, Inc.’ is to do the same thing with respect to the Church of Wokeism.” He defines “wokeism” as a creed that has arisen in America in response to the “moral vacuum” created by the ebbing from public life of faith, patriotism and “the identity we derived from hard work.” He argues that notions like “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “sustainability” have come to take their place.

“Our collective moral insecurities,” Mr. Ramaswamy says, “have left us vulnerable” to the blandishments and propaganda of the new political and corporate elites, who are now locked in a cynical “arranged marriage, where each partner has contempt for the other.” Each side is getting out of the “trade” something it “could not have gotten alone.”