RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/reflections/2021/04/the-very-devil-of-a-thing-to-comprehend/

If you haven’t heard of Cardi B, the rapper responsible for a sexually graphic hit that earned her a meeting with a fawning Joe Biden immediately before the recent US election, there is little chance another rising star will elicit a nod of recognition. This one goes by name of Lil Nas X and he has taken things to a whole new level. In this case, a level of Hell, and I mean that literally. A self-described children’s performer, Lil Nas X — real name Montero Lamar Hill— has recently released a music video of himself sliding down a stripper’s pole to perform sexual acts upon the Devil, seated upon his satanic throne (above). For this he has been praised by academics.

The question is, how have we come to this point as a culture, and in particular a Western nation? A time when—just as in ancient Israel—someone like the Biblical prophet Isaiah could lament those in his day who call evil good and good evil, who traded darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Isaiah 5:20). The answer is somewhat complex.

In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote a book called, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Rieff’s thesis was that the West had rejected God and in His place sought to create a society where the individual was liberated to indulge in the freedom of one’s own sensuality as an integral part of the pursuit of personal happiness. However, with the ‘therapeutic’ replacing the transcendent moral order traditionally provided by religion, this has only led to the triumph of what I refer to as “therapeutic totalitarianism”.

Just over 50 years after Rieff’s work was published, we’re starting to perceive ever more clearly the bitter fruit of such a Prometheanism endeavour, i.e. the idea than the individual human has unlimited and godlike  potential to re-create the world to accord with one’s own passions and desires. For an excellent analysis and contemporary application of Reiff’s work, see Carl. R. Trueman’s, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Another, even more prescient contribution in this regard is Rod Dreher’s, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (Sentinel, 2020). Dreher explores how “the menace of totalitarianism” is still a very real threat to Western society. As he explains:

The term totalitarianism was first used by supporters of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who defined totalitarianism concisely: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” That is to say, totalitarianism is a state in which nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/crisis-two-constitutions-and-two

“In thinking through the crisis of American national identity, we should keep in mind the opening words of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths’. Usually, and correctly, we emphasize the truths that are held in common, but we must not forget the ‘We’ who holds them. The American creed is the keystone of American national identity: but it requires a culture to sustain it,” Charles Kesler writes in Crisis of the Two Constitutions.

That to some degree encapsulates the complex textual journey through a history of American political ideas to the fundamental cultural challenges captured in Crisis of the Two Constitutions.

Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, refers to what the respected Claremont McKenna College professor calls a struggle “between two rival cultures, two constitutions, two ways of life”. This linkage between culture and constitution, between how we live and our laws, is often tragically neglected in conservative thought.

But there’s no constitution without a culture. The “self-evident” truths of the Declaration of Independence and its natural rights are only natural and self-evident to a culture that has reached the same conclusions. When Americans revolted against British rule, their rhetoric of independence was neither foreign nor alien to the intellectual traditions of both sides.

The two nations may have been, as Churchill much later quipped, divided by a common language, but America now contains two nations that no longer share a common language of values. And even when speaking of the Constitution, they are really speaking of the two constitutions of the book’s title, the original Constitution and the “living constitution”.

The two constitutions also reflect two cultures, one traditional and the other forever changing, and two peoples, one centered in its origins, and the other pursuing an impossible future.

https://unstoppablesiggi.com/

Winner – Best of Los Angeles Award’s “Best Holocaust Book – 2021”

“A must-read that hopefully will be adapted for the screen. Greene lets Wilzig’s effervescent spirit shine through, and his story will appeal to a wide variety of readers.” – Library Journal

Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three vows: to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice. He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets.

Siggi’s ascent from the darkest of yesterdays to the brightest of tomorrows holds sway over the imagination in this riveting narrative of grit, cunning, luck, and the determination to live life to the fullest.

https://spectator.us/topic/hunter-biden-book-beautiful-things-cbs-interview/

“All this makes Beautiful Things more than a celebrity addict’s confession. It’s a whitewash, an attempt to spin Hunter Biden’s story back onto the familiar rails of pity and redemption – and yet another attempt by Hunter to spin some cash out of his famous last name while the media cover for him. There’s nothing of public interest in any of this, is there?”

Biden is dishonest. His memory is shot. He’s an influence-peddler pretending to be a victim, a lifelong exploiter of his public position who hides behind the lowest forms of sentimentality.

Hunter Biden, of course. You’d have to be on the wrong end of a three-day crack binge to confuse Hunter Biden with the impeccably honest, mentally agile and profoundly principled multimillionaire career politician Joe Biden.

Hunter has written an autobiography. Or rather, some desperate and shameless mercenary has ghosted it for him. It belongs to the most execrable category of literature, the political memoir — the sort of book written to launch a political career (Dreams From My Father) or, as in this case, to end one (Ten Percent for the Big Guy).

The book is called Beautiful Things and has a picture of Hunter as a child on its cover. NPR calls it ‘harrowing’ and compares it to ‘degradation porn’. Perhaps this is supposed to dissuade NPR listeners from looking too closely: NPR prefers ethical porn. But we should look closely, because Hunter Biden’s business dealings are a matter of national interest. So is the ongoing effort by a mostly pro-Democratic media to kill the story around him.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/hope-springs-eternal-lloyd-billingsley/

“The future seemed empty to Wraithby. It was easy to burn up the past, but not so easy to face a future lacking everything that had given the past substance.”

That is from Winter in Moscow, by Malcolm Muggeridge, first published in 1934, and proclaimed by historian A.J.P Taylor as the best book on Soviet Russia. In 2021, Winter in Moscow could well be the best book for what is now going on in America: surging totalitarianism, fake news, cancel culture, and wokeness. That dynamic was already on display when Muggeridge went to the USSR in 1932 as a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian.

Wokeness took the form of a general idea in narrow, empty minds, an idea pioneered by French historian Hippolyte Taine. Since these minds are incapable of questioning the idea, they become quite literally possessed. The prevailing general idea of the time was a classless, utopian society, which Wraithby, the name Muggeridge uses for himself, accurately calls the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

As Wraithby observes, “from time to time the Dictatorship of the Proletariat dramatizes its inner conflicts, assembles a cast and plays out on a stage a mimic battle. Triumphantly leads itself in chains through the streets of Moscow in honor of a mimic victory.”  In Red Square, Wraithby visits the Lenin mausoleum and reflects: “The head inside its glass case was fungoid, fresh and vivid like a fungus growing in darkness, unwholesome like a fungus, soft and poisonous.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/noah-green-and-not-all-muslims-do-jamie-glazov/

Introduction: Just recently, we witnessed U.S. authorities and the establishment media try their hardest to de-Islamize the Jihad mass shooting in Boulder, Colorado, and to obscure the fact that the Jihadist perpetrator, Ahmad Al Issa, is a Muslim migrant ISIS sympathizer.

And now we see the same pattern with Noah Green, who crashed his car into a barricade at the U.S. Capitol building last Friday, hitting Capitol Police officers, one of whom was killed and a second severely injured. Green also got out of his car and charged officers with a knife. The establishment media clearly salivated at the prospect of the perpetrator being a white supporter of Donald Trump, so that they could perpetuate their false narrative about the threat of “white supremacist terrorism” all around us. But alas for the media, it was not to be: Green was a black man and a member of the Nation of Islam. And so he is, typically and expectedly, no longer in the news. President Biden heroically led the way, making no mention of Green’s ideology in his statement on the attack and, instead of condemning Green’s violence, alluding instead to the mob that stormed Capitol Hill in January. Even Facebook did its faithful leftist duty, deleting – within the blink of an eye – Green’s Facebook page, where the Capitol barricade crasher proclaimed himself a “Follower of Farrakhan.” Louis Farrakhan is, of course, the leader of the Nation of Islam, which, apart from things like stirring hatred of whites and Jews, embraces Islam’s jihad doctrine.

‘Not All Muslims Do That!’

Now that we have learned how and why the Left perpetuates Jihad Denial, we move on to examine the key arguments within its toxic agenda. As will be demonstrated below, the entire gambit is a lie and a fraud.

It’s Just the Extremists!

One of the most widely employed Jihad Denial arguments heard in our culture today is the infamous assurance that It’s not Islam, but the extremists! This proposition is interwoven with the central foundation of the Jihad Denial matrix: that it all really has nothing to do with Islam. The thinking goes like this: even when Jihadists quote their Islamic texts to justify their barbaric actions, it is not because of Islam. The terrorists, we are told, are just a very tiny minority of Muslims who have misunderstood and hijacked their own religion. They are, therefore, not even real Muslims.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_oneparty_state.html

The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, by David Horowitz

Regnery, 2021

David Horowitz has been warning for decades that the American left stands in opposition to America, in both its lack of appreciation of the principles of the American founding expressed in both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and of the country’s history and achievements and economic system which have enabled the nation to grow and prosper.  America’s history is hardly blemish free, of course, with a long and troubling record with among others, Native Americans and Blacks who were brought to the country as slaves, and who faced mistreatment and discrimination after the Civil War for a century or more. But America’s record is also one of addressing and often overcoming these challenges to its founding principles, including the enormous sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of  lives in our Civil War, which resulted in the end of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, which saw new laws passed to finally finish off the Jim Crow system, eliminate imposed segregation, end discrimination in public accommodations, and create real voting rights for blacks and all citizens.

Horowitz’s latest book is clear on how the left views this history as an un-ending struggle by oppressed people of color against racism and white supremacy, which it argues has been the core value of our country since 1619.  The left argues that this requires an unraveling or destruction of all the systems of economic control and racism which exist and continue to damage marginalized groups.

Horowitz’s latest book is a stark warning on how close we now are to the left accomplishing its long-term goal of dominating American politics in perpetuity. Horowitz has always distinguished the left, with its Marxist and totalitarian orientation, visions and goals from a more conventional and mainstream liberal polity, which has always been part of the American two-party system, sometimes in power, sometimes not.  Today the left has moved from its ancestral home on the college campus which it has dominated for half a century, to gaining power and control of many other major American institutions, and now to a position of near dominance of American politics, through its control of the Democratic Party.