RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an era when bipartisanship seems impossible, and votes on people, policies and bills are riven with harsh rhetoric and monolithic and intractable behavior by the Democrat legislators, I returned to a book which details the partnership of a Democrat President with a staunch conservative Republican Senator.  rsk

Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World by Lawrence J. Haas

With Franklin Roosevelt’s death in April of 1945, Vice President Harry Truman and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican leader on foreign policy, inherited a world in turmoil. With Europe flattened and the Soviets emerging as America’s new adversary, Truman and Vandenberg built a tight, bipartisan partnership at a bitterly partisan time to craft a dramatic new foreign policy through which the United States stepped boldly onto the world stage to protect its friends, confront its enemies, and promote freedom. These two men transformed America from a reluctant global giant to a self-confident leader; from a nation that traditionally turned inward after war to one that remained engaged to shape the postwar landscape; and from a nation with no real military establishment to one that now spends more on defense than the next dozen nations combined.

Lawrence J. Haas, an award-winning journalist, reveals how, through the close collaboration of Truman and Vandenberg, the United States created the United Nations to replace the League of Nations, pursued the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from communist threat, launched the Marshall Plan to rescue Western Europe’s economy from the devastation of war, and established NATO to defend Western Europe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fauci-childrens-book-scheduled-for-publication-in-june/

Simon & Schuster will publish a children’s book about Dr. Anthony Fauci on June 29, CNN reported on Monday.

The book was written with Dr. Fauci’s approval, and he and his team were consulted throughout the process, a Simon & Schuster spokesperson confirmed. Author Kate Messner said she contacted Dr. Fauci‘s office in spring 2020 to consult about a separate book project, but inquired in the fall on whether she could write a standalone book about him.

“I was aware that I was asking for time from someone who was literally one of the busiest people in America as he provided public health guidance during the worst of the pandemic, but I also knew that Dr. Fauci understands how essential education is in public health,” Messner told CNN. Messner was able to interview Dr. Fauci several times “at the edges of his long work days.”

The book will in part highlight Dr. Fauci’s own childhood in the New York borough of Brooklyn, during which he delivered prescriptions for his father’s pharmacy.

Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been at the forefront of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Trump administration brought Dr. Fauci on as part of the White House coronavirus task force, although the former president repeatedly clashed with him on pandemic policy, at one point calling him a “disaster” and “an idiot.”

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/live-not-by-politics?token=

EXCERPTS

I realize that sounds nuts given that my work requires me to read for many hours each day. But I don’t mean Internet-reading or newspaper-reading or even magazine-reading. I mean paper in hand, curled up on couch while eating chips, or laying in the Los Angeles sun old-fashioned reading. This mostly happens on Shabbat, when we mostly turn off our phones for 25 hours. (Nellie, who has the zeal of the convert, sometimes catches me texting in a closet.)

I wanted to share some of my favorites of the past six months. Soon I’m going to launch a book club to bring my favorite writers to you, so consider this a very initial foray into that project.

What the hell is going on? How did things get so broken? And how can we live well inside (or despite) the brokenness? There are three books I’ve read that answer each one of those questions.

THE REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC by former CIA analyst Martin Gurri is the book I have recommended more than any other this past year. He owes me a cut, as I told him in a recent interview, which I’m going to write up for a future column.

Anyone that thinks the primary conflict in America is between Republicans and Democrats is out to lunch. The real conflict — not just in this country but in the 21st century — is the one between what Gurri variously calls the center and the border, the hierarchy and the network, or the elites in their ivory towers and the public in their chaotic squares. That conflict has been created by the digital revolution. If you dream of things calming down or going back to normal anytime soon, bad news: we are only at the very beginning.

The tool of the revolution is information. The authority of 20th century institutions like Harvard or The New York Times depended on scarcity; they genuinely had access to exclusive information and secret knowledge. That authority has utterly collapsed under the force of the never-ending tsunami of information available to any fool with Google.

If you want to understand how seemingly discreet phenomenon like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the GameStop short squeeze are actually all part of one story, Gurri, who published this book in 2014, will show you.

Most important, he will convince you, once and for all, that the old hierarchies are dead and no amount of nostalgia can revive them. The real question is what comes next.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-wont-let-you-read-my-book-11615934447?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

A decade ago, most Americans had never had a conversation about transgender issues. Now a question few had asked has only one acceptable answer. “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time,” President Biden tweeted in January 2020. “There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.”

Can we talk about that?

We might want to talk about what policies are best when it comes to athletics, for example. Should high-school girls be losing championship races to boys who identify as girls? How about female-only spaces, like shelters for victims of domestic violence? Should women in dire straits be forced to spend the night with men who identify as women?

And what’s causing the surge in the number of girls seeking sex-reassignment procedures in the past decade? Might we want to find that out before we rush to conclude that puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormone therapies—and even double mastectomies for 13-year-olds—are a human right?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/anti-semite-chief-frontpage-magazine/

Editors’ note: Below is a letter from the leaders of ZOA to the publishers of Obama’s new book, “A Promised Land.” They point out all the falsehoods, lies and omissions about Israel in the book, and make a request for their correction.

Re: Falsehoods, Misleading Statements and Material Omissions in “A Promised Land,” by Barack Obama

Dear Mr. Dohle and Ms. McIntosh:           

We write on behalf of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), the oldest and one of the largest pro-Israel organizations in the U.S.  The ZOA is a leader in fighting against antisemitism and anti-Israel bias wherever these problems arise.

Having received complaints from our supporters and conducting our own review, we are deeply concerned about the factual inaccuracies, material omissions and outright falsehoods contained in one of your recent publications – “A Promised Land” by former U.S. President Barack Obama.  The many errors are serious and damaging.  The book has already reached and influenced millions of readers and will impact many more.  We expect that this book will be assigned reading in schools and at colleges and universities, affecting how young people and future leaders perceive Israel.  Obama’s many factual errors and misleading statements will likely be repeated and quoted in articles and other books.  As a result, millions of people will be misled into drawing false and negative conclusions about Jews and Israel. 

To paraphrase Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, President Obama is entitled to his own opinions about Israel, which he expresses in Chapter 25 of his book.  But he is not entitled to his own facts.

We believe that you value the accuracy of your nonfiction books and support appropriate vetting because reportedly, you provide a stipend for your nonfiction authors to hire fact-checkers.  Given the many factual errors that we have identified and outlined below, the fact-checking of “A Promised Land” was sloppily done, if it was done at all.  Knowing that this book, written by a former U.S. president, would have enormous reach and influence, it was a mistake not to subject this book to the most scrupulous fact-checking possible.

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

Andy Ngo’s new book tells the truth about this organization and why it should not be ignored

The mainstream media — silent on the Marxist ideology, violence, and militancy of groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) — deceptively reported that the protests they inflicted on over 200 U.S. cities in 2020 were “mostly peaceful.” It deceitfully transformed the mayhem into a “summer of love.” Widespread rioting, looting, arson, murder, assaults, and destruction of property and businesses went unreported. Such abject failure explains why polls consistently rank the media among America’s least trusted institutions.

Given media complicity with radical groups, it’s not surprising that the Los Angeles Times dismissed Andy Ngo’s Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy as unserious, “supremely dishonest,” and “self-serving.” While video-recording left-wing protests as part of his independent reporting in 2019, Ngo was assaulted and hit with a milkshake containing quick-dry cement. But the Times dismissed his allegation of a brain injury from that attack. It says he’s fixated on the “imaginary threat of Antifa” and ignores the “real danger” from far-right extremists.

Ngo’s book is a riveting exposé of the background, structure and workings of the collectivist militant group, set on destroying capitalism and America’s history, culture, and institutions. He presents an accurate, well-researched picture of this insurrectionist movement, its widespread network and its hostility to the rule of law and democracy.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-prophet-of-the-trump-era-255

I entered Martin Gurri’s world on August 1, 2015. Though I hadn’t read The Revolt of the Public, at the time a little-known book by the former CIA analyst of open news sources, I hit a disorienting moment of a type he’d described in his opening chapter. There are times, he wrote, “when tomorrow no longer resembles yesterday… the compass cracks, by which we navigate existence. We are lost at sea.”

Gurri’s book is about how popular uprisings are triggered by collapses of faith in traditional hierarchies of power. I felt such a collapse that day in Waterloo, Iowa, covering the Republican presidential primary. The first debate was five days away and the man expected to occupy center stage, Donald Trump, held a seemingly inexplicable six-point lead.

Two weeks before, on July 18th, Trump lashed out against former Republican nominee John McCain. Even McCain’s critics considered his physical and mental scars from years as a Vietnam war prisoner to be unassailable proofs of patriotic gravitas, but the service-evading Trump was having none of it. “I don’t like losers,” he said, adding, “He’s only a war hero because he was captured.” It was the universal belief among colleagues in campaign journalism that this was an unsurvivable gaffe, a “Dean scream” moment. We expected him to apologize and wash out. Instead, he called McCain a “dummy” and kept a firm grasp on the lead.

A different candidate, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, was in Waterloo. Two years before, Time all but dubbed Christie the favorite for 2016 with a silhouette cover portrait, over the nastily shallow (but publicity-generating) double-entendre headline, THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. Christie was every Washington consultant’s idea of a “crossover” superstar. I’d describe the concept in Rolling Stone as someone “mean enough for the right-wing, but also knows a gay person or once read a French novel.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/03/how-wokeness-captured-big-business/

A review of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business” by Stephen R. Soukup (Encounter Books, 208 pages, $25.99)

During the 2019 shareholder season, Justin Danhof, general counsel for the National Center for Public Policy Research, tabled a shareholder proposal at Amazon’s annual meeting. “Diversity in board composition is best achieved through highly qualified candidates with a wide range of skills, experience, beliefs, and board independence from management,” it read. Uncontroversial, one might think, but Danhof was booed and heckled throughout his presentation.

Afterward, a representative for Arjuna Capital (which “works with high net-worth individuals,” its website says) told Danhof that he was simply trying “to protect white males.” A representative of the Nathan Cummings Foundation (with $424 million of cash and investments, on its most recent balance sheet) made clear that Danhof was unwelcome and should hasten, lest he be late for his next Klan meeting or book burning.

The incident is recounted in Stephen R. Soukup’s The Dictatorship of Woke Capital. What explains the greening of Wall Street and corporate CEOs becoming woke and dissing the system that made them rich? In part, it is a cheap way of buying protection—especially when shareholders are paying, as is the case with Marc Benioff, multi-billionaire CEO of Salesforce. “Capitalism, as we know it, is dead,” Benioff declared in the New York Times. Described as “one of the modern-day robber barons,” Benioff earned his billions from a series of acquisitions of profitless software companies and constant stock sales. Benioff’s schtick is “a confidence game in the true sense of the term,” says market analyst Ben Hunt.

Wokeness is not a system of morality with universal applicability. “With every breath we take,” Apple CEO Tim Cook declared in the wake of George Floyd’s death, “we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone.” Well, not for everyone—not for the tens of thousands of Chinese workers at Apple’s Foxconn iPhone factory at Longhua. In 2010, a spate of suicides led Foxconn to install nets outside many buildings to catch falling bodies.