RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-soul-of-black-conservatism-11622226565?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Mr. Riley is a Journal columnist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell,” from which this article is adapted.”

Economist Thomas Sowell has grown accustomed to a certain type of media query, usually from white interviewers. They want to know how, as a black conservative, he has dealt with criticism from fellow blacks. Charlie Rose once asked: “How was it, though, for you . . . to be an African-American man respected by a cross-section of your peers and yet be so against the grain of fellow African-Americans?”

Mr. Sowell, 90, usually responds by challenging the premise. “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.”

In another interview, Mr. Sowell told C-Span’s Brian Lamb that black strangers regularly stop him in public and compliment his views: “When I checked out of my hotel this morning, the black security guard came over and said, ‘Are you Sowell?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he shook my hand warmly and we walked—he walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and about that. . . . So, it’s not Sowell versus blacks. It’s the black intellectuals.”

There is a long history of conflating the interests of black Americans with those of black organizations, black journalists, black academics and other elites. The media lazily continues to turn to these groups, from the NAACP to Black Lives Matter, as if they speak for all black people.

In December 1980, Mr. Sowell headlined the “Black Alternatives” conference in San Francisco. Its goal was to showcase the variety of perspectives among black politicians, intellectuals and civil-rights activists. “The people who were invited,” he began his keynote address, “are people who are seeking alternatives, people who have challenged the conventional wisdom on one or more issues, people who have thought for themselves instead of marching in step and chanting familiar refrains. . . . We have come through a historic phase of struggle for basic civil rights—a very necessary struggle, but not sufficient. The very success of that struggle has created new priorities and new urgencies. There are economic realities to confront and self-development to achieve, in the schools, at work, in our communities.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/wright-stuff-lloyd-billingsley/

Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, written in the 1940s, has now made the best-seller list in 2021. In this short novel, police torture an innocent black man into confessing a double murder. The author, who died in 1960, also spent time in a political underground, and that too has escaped the attention it deserves.

Born in Mississippi in 1908, Richard Wright gained fame for Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Wright also served a stint in the Communist Party, and explained his experience in The God That Failed (1949), with former Communists such as Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon),  Andre Gide (The Immoralist) and Ignazio Silone (Fontamara). As Wright discovered, the Communists held his intelligence and literary skill against him.

“He talks like a book,” said one of the comrades, “and that was enough to condemn me forever as a bourgeois.” In the Communist Party, Wright learned, “a man could not have his say.” Party Stalinists smeared Wright as a “bastard intellectual” and “incipient Trotskyite,” with an “anti-leadership attitude.” The Communist Party, dominated by whites, “felt it had to assassinate me morally merely because I did not want to be bound by its decisions,” and Wright got the message loud and clear.

“I knew that if they held state power I should have been declared guilty of treason and my execution would have followed.” In his stories, Wright had assigned “a role of honor and glory to the Communist Party.” That was now “finished” and “I knew in my heart that I should never be able to write that way again.”

Richard Wright was a close friend of Frank Marshall Davis, who read the galley proofs for Native Son and reviewed Black Boy for the Associated Negro Press (ANP). Wright used the photo Davis had taken of him to accompany the Time magazine review of Black Boy.

In his memoir Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet, Davis accused Wright of selling out and “redbaiting.” Davis remained in the Communist Party and spent much of his life defending all-white Stalinist dictatorships in the USSR. In the late 1940s, the CPUSA sent Davis to Hawaii, then a prime target of Stalinist expansionism. That failed when Hawaii became a U.S. State in 1959. Frank remained on the island and his pro-Soviet activities landed him on the FBI’s security index.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/correcting-1619s-falsehoods-about-the-american-founding-11621981288?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Regular readers of these pages need no introduction to Robert Woodson. For the uninitiated, Mr. Woodson is a veteran community activist who broke with the traditional civil-rights leadership in the 1970s after realizing that the agenda of “racial grievance groups” like the NAACP was increasingly at odds with the actual wants and needs of the black underclass.

The Washington-based Woodson Center is a community-development organization dedicated to improving conditions in poor neighborhoods, where broken homes, violent crime and abysmal public schools are common. Unlike its liberal counterparts, the center encourages communities to look inward for solutions, as blacks often did with remarkable success before the 1960s, rather than to the government.

Yet Mr. Woodson also makes time to push back at the machinations of progressivism. After the New York Times published its “1619 Project”—which posits that America’s true founding was not 1776 but 1619, the year African slaves arrived in Virginia, and that the American Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery—he became incensed. Not only was it junk history, but it would be disseminated through school curriculums in the name of helping blacks. Mr. Woodson responded by initiating his own project, “1776 Unites,” which enlisted a group of black scholars, journalists and social activists “who uphold the true origins of our nation and the principles through which its founding promise can be fulfilled.”

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“There is incredible variability in how we have used our democracy, with plenty of room for ugliness without apocalypse, and for reform without utopia.”   Jon Grinspan

The preamble to the Constitution begins: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union…” The emphasis is on “more.” The Founders never claimed to have formed a “perfect” Union, but one better than those that then existed. Also, in providing a process to improve and adjust the Constitution amendments were permitted. In fact, the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were ratified on December 15, 1791. In the subsequent 230 years, seventeen additional amendments have been ratified. Our democracy is not static; it adjusts, not easily but judiciously, as customs and behaviors change. Jon Grinspan has given us, who now live in a new age of political strife, a well-written – albeit brief – informative look at the fifty years following the Civil War – a time of political acrimony.

The time span covered by Mr. Grinspan – 1865 to 1915 – begins with the assassination of Lincoln and a Country emerging from the Civil War; it ends with the United States having surpassed Britain as the world’s largest industrial power. He takes us through Reconstruction and how it petered out, with violence in the South against blacks and with the North having given up on the concept of equal rights. We travel through the “Gilded Age” when fortunes were made in railroads, mining, oil, steel, electricity, shipping, newspapers and finance, and when former farmhands, women and children were recruited to work in city sweat shops and factories, where they performed low-paying, mind-numbing (often dangerous) repetitive jobs. His story ends with the reforms of the “Progressive Era.” In the early post-Civil War period, the public wanted the entertainment that political campaigners provided: “They expected charisma and wit and the hottest-burning fuel of the era: political outrage.” During these fifty years, we saw eleven Presidents, high voter turnout and two Presidents assassinated, Garfield and McKinley. Voter turnout peaked in the election of 1896 at 79.5%. Twenty-eight years later it troughed at 48.8% in 1924. While Republicans dominated the White House during the fifty years covered by Mr. Grinspan, elections were always close. The only two Presidents to be elected with more than 53% of the popular vote during that period were Ulysses Grant in 1872 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Presidential election winners in 1880,1884, 1888, 1892 and 1912 won with less than 50% of the popular vote.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/a-great-artists-career-in-anti-communism/

A rare voice of sanity in the theater, Tom Stoppard vigorously rebuked and lampooned the most monstrous idea of his time.

 I f the Left can be reduced to a word, it is “utopianism.” Seeking to perfect man, progressives can never be satisfied with the state of things. To be a progressive means consistently to overlook undeniable progress — decreased poverty, for instance, or enhanced opportunity for minorities of all kinds — while insisting that everything is still terrible and calling for redoubling the fight with huge new injections of funding and ever-expanding bureaucracies.

By contrast, our greatest living playwright, Tom Stoppard, makes a Chestertonian case for accepting our gifts and muddling through. The director Mike Nichols once called him “the only writer I know who is completely happy.” Conservatism at its core rejects ideology — it is what is left behind when the grand schemes collapse and people just get on with it.

In the other direction, the revolutionary one, lies catastrophe. As recounted in Hermione Lee’s impressively wide-ranging new biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, Stoppard’s most successful work this century is the nine-hour trilogy The Coast of Utopia (2002), the sprawling story of the mid-19th-century radicals and intellectuals, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who contemplated how Russian society should be reformed after the last tsar. The work is an ingenious way of reviewing the greatest human disaster of all time, the Communist debacle, by considering its ideological conception.

Bakunin, a proto-Bolshevik, argues in the play for a maximalist approach that starts with a vengeful spree against the ruling class; but Stoppard’s sympathies clearly lie with the meliorism of Herzen, who pleads “to open men’s eyes and not to tear them out. To bring what’s good along with them.” Herzen’s final speech, which Stoppard took almost verbatim from an 1855 essay, cautions against the folly of the “ancient dream” of “a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way toward it, we won’t be grown up as human beings.”

Stoppard, nearly alone in his industry, resolutely made the case against communism and utopianism, from the Seventies on into this century. His having been right about communism isn’t why he’s an essential artist — and right-wing artists can be hacks too — but the virtue of his convictions gives his plays a satisfying heft to go along with their famous wit, effervescence, and undergraduate vigor.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/so_barry_trump_is_a_sexist_pig.html

In his forthcoming book, Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump, Edward-Isaac Dovere reveals a few choice words that former president Barack Obama had for his successor, Donald Trump. As reported in the Guardian, these include “madman”, a “racist, sexist pig,” “that f—ing lunatic,” and a “corrupt motherf—er.”

In his own most recent memoir, Promised Land, Obama’s fixation on Trump is manifest. In fact, it borders on obsession. In reviewing that memoir for my own forthcoming book, Barack Obama’s Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, I could not help but notice, however, just how situational is Obama’s objection to the sexual mores of others.

There is, of course, his and Michelle’s coziness with Hollywood pervert and major Democratic donor, Harvey Weinstein. In fact, their daughter Malia interned with Weinstein. Tweeted cultural critic Frank Rich after the Weinstein saga became too big to ignore, “Biggest mystery of @nytimes Weinstein story: How exemplary parents like Obamas let their daughter work there. The stories were out there.”

Said Obama long after he should have spoken out, “Michelle and I have been disgusted by the recent reports about Harvey Weinstein. Any man who demeans and degrades women in such fashion needs to be condemned and held accountable, regardless of wealth or status.”

“Any man,” that is, except those who are politically useful, and none was more useful to Obama than the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. About Kennedy, Obama cannot gush enough. The Kennedy Obama came to know, he tells us in A Promised Land, was “the closest thing Washington had to a living legend.”

http://A new book from savagely attacks Obama from the left By Andrea Widburg

The book is Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump, and it may end forever the Democrats’ Obama worship.
Something has changed lately on the left. Democrats should be riding high now because they control the federal government: They’ve got the White House; the House; the Senate (sort of, with the filibuster the fragile thread keeping them from total control); and a Supreme Court that, while ostensibly conservative, has a closet leftist Chief Justice and two remarkably cowed new “conservative” justices. Nevertheless, they are an angry, fractious party. Last week, the knives came out for Kamala Harris. This coming week, a new book launches a scathing attack on that former secular saint, Barack Obama.

Since 2008, Barack Obama has been the Democrat party. He was the president who could do no wrong. Every political attack against him was discounted as “racism.” He was more charming, more intelligent, more emotionally attuned, more effective, and more just everything good than any man who had ever occupied the White House, including Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln combined. (Of course, all of them were racists.)

When Trump came along, the Democrats and their media shills weren’t merely offended by his politics. In many ways, the gravest offense was that this loud, combative, conservative-governing orange man dared to step into a White House made hallowed by the presence of a man once hailed as a “magic negro” or another crucified Jesus.

Both Biden and Kamala got reverential treatment, but it was nothing like Obama. Biden was grandfatherly, experienced, kind, stable, and he’d learned his White House politics under Obama’s aegis. Kamala was brilliant, multi-racial and multi-cultural, female, and compassionate. Kamala was sold especially hard because everyone understood that Biden, no matter what he said, wasn’t in it for the long haul. She was obviously going to be the real president, even before Biden inevitably withdrew and she got sworn in.

But as noted, something’s been happening with the Democrats. They should be a jubilant party joyously imposing Marxism on the land but, instead, they’re angry and they’re starting to turn on each other. Just last week, Edward-Isaac Dovere, a long-standing author at The Atlantic, published a very nasty attack on Kamala, although one phased in polite terms.