RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/17/space-force-commanders-book-about-marxist-takeover-of-military-shoots-up-to-number-1-after-hes-fired-for-talking-about-it/

A new book about the Marxist takeover of the military shot to number one on Amazon’s best seller list after the author, a former commander of a U.S. Space Force unit, was fired for promoting it.

Lt Col. Matthew Lohmeier, commander of 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, was relieved from his post after he appeared on a podcast to promote his book: “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military.”

“Irresistible Revolution is a timely and bold contribution from an active-duty Space Force lieutenant colonel who sees the impact of a neo-Marxist agenda at the ground level within our armed forces,” a description of the book reads.

Lohmeier, a former instructor and fighter pilot, was tasked with detecting ballistic missile launches.

He was fired on Friday for comments he made on national security expert L. Todd Wood’s podcast “Information Operation” last week, according to Military.com.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/14/josh-hawleys-book-debuts-as-top-10-bestseller-despite-cancellation-attempts/

Sen. Josh Hawley’s new book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech” is selling at rapid rates following a cancellation attempt by Simon and Schuster in January for his stance on election integrity.

According to Publishers Weekly, Hawley’s book ranks sixth in the nation for hardcover frontlist nonfiction. Since the book was released on May 4, Hawley has sold nearly 21,000 copies and shows no sign of slowing down. In its first week on Amazon’s “Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week” list, Hawley’s book ranked number 15.

The Washington-based Regnery Publishing company made a deal with Hawley shortly after New York-based Simon and Schuster canceled their deal with the senator one day after the Capitol riot due to a “pressure campaign organized by leftist activists.” Their reasoning for pulling back on the deal, Simon and Schuster claimed without evidence, was that Hawley is linked to the storming of Capitol because he publicly questioned the 2020 election results.

Hawley’s book outlines how corporate America uses its influence to “cancel me and to cancel or control the speech, the communication, even the ideas of millions of Americans—all Americans, in a sense, because what the woke capitalists want, along with their allies in government, is to preserve their power over American politics and society.