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BOOKS

The Roots of Insurrection: Antifa Exposed By Janet Levy

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.

The Prophet Of The Trump Era Review of Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Public,” the book that called both an uprising and a reaction Matt Taibbi

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.”

How Wokeness Captured Big Business For those looking to understand how we got here, Stephen Soukup’s new book is the best place to start. By Rupert Darwall

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.

 “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” 

http://www.newsmax.com/politics/presidential-campaign-election-basement/2021/03/02/id/1012223/?ns_mail_uid=

A new book chronicles how President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, despite being his own biggest liability, the New York Post reported Tuesday.

The book “Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency” will be released April 6, marveling at the winning campaign strategy of “you put your dumb uncle in the basement.”

The book, written by NBC News’ Jonathan Allen and The Hill’s Amie Parnes, notes even former President Barack Obama was reluctant to endorse his former vice president, fearing he would be a “tragicomic caricature of an aging politician having his last hurrah,” so he has to be shielded from harming his own campaign.

Third time was a charm for Biden, as the “stars aligned” the authors wrote.

Also, perspectives from inside former President Donald Trump’s White House and campaign detail the conversations between 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and President Trump.

“I think if we lose to him, we are pathetic,” Conway told Trump, the book claims.

The authors also wrote the 2017 book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” detailing the anger of Clinton on election night.

A source familiar with Trump campaign polling said the COVID-19 pandemic turned the election against the president.

“Until the COVID thing came, we were winning four hundred electoral votes,” the source told the authors, per the Post.

Not only did it damage the president, but it shielded Biden from having to leave his basement, the book noted.

“They used coronavirus as an excuse to keep him in the basement, and it was smart,” according to a Trump adviser in the book. “Biden was able to hide his biggest weakness, which is himself. And he did it with an excuse that sounded responsible.”

Even one Biden aide saw their candidate’s shortcomings.

“I cringed the entire time. He looked like he didn’t know what he was doing,” the book’s source said.

 

How the 1957 Flu Pandemic Was Stopped Early in Its Path By the time the virus reached the U.S., the country already had a vaccine ready. Becky Little

https://www.history.com/news/1957-flu-pandemic-vaccine-hilleman?li_source=LI&li_medium=m2m-rcw-history

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said “women carried glassy-eyed children tied to their backs.” He quickly got to work, putting out the word that there was a pandemic coming and pushing to develop a vaccine by the time school started again in the fall.

The first case of the pandemic had appeared in the Guizhou Province of southwestern China in February 1957. By the time Hilleman read about it in April, the Times reported that an estimated 250,000 Hong Kong residents—or 10 percent of the region’s population—were receiving treatment for it.

“We all missed it,” he later recalled for The Vaccine Makers Project. “The military missed it, and the World Health Organization missed it.”

The day after reading the story, he sent a cable to an Army Medical General Laboratory in Zama, Japan, asking the staff to investigate what was going on in Hong Kong. A medical officer identified a member of the U.S. Navy who’d become infected in Hong Kong, and sent the serviceman’s saliva back to Hilleman in the United States so he could study the virus.

The ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ Gets Into the Censorship Business Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/the-worlds-largest-bookstore-gets-into-the-censorship-business/

Amazon’s decision to remove Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally isn’t about a P.C. company removing one book—it is a challenge to the fundamental principles underlying American democracy.

Just a week ago, I received an email from Ryan Anderson, who was recently tapped to lead the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and who wrote When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment for me at Encounter Books back in 2018. A reader who had tried to order his book from Amazon reported he was unable to find the book listed on the site. I looked myself and, yes, that reader was correct. Other books by Anderson are listed, as are various books on the “transgender” phenomenon, including a now out-of-print title that purports to rebut When Harry Became Sally. But the book itself is nowhere to be found. 

How odd. The book was controversial when it was first published—the New York Times devoted not one but two columns to abusing it. But it sold well and, outside the precincts of wokedom, it was regarded as what it is: a thoughtful, compassionate, and well-researched discussion of the devastating psychological costs of embracing the latest fad of sexual exoticism. 

What happened? Was it an accident? A little digging showed that, like the Earl of Strafford, Amazon’s motto was “Thorough.” It was not just that a book that had been listed and sold by Amazon for the last three years was “out of stock” or “unavailable.” It had disappeared without a trace, more or less like Nikolai Yezhov standing next to Josef Stalin in that notorious photo by the Moscow Canal. One day he is seen smiling next to the great leader. The next day he is gone, airbrushed from history.

So it was with When Harry Became Sally. Amazon had pushed it into the oubliette; the book was gone, “canceled” by the wardens of wokeness at Amazon. Further inquiries show that it was also gone from the Kindle store and from Audible, the audiobooks emporium that is owned by Amazon. As of this writing, the book is still available at Barnes and Noble and other emporia, including at the Encounter Books website.

The Danger of Unassailable Ideas Treating beliefs as truths makes it impossible for the academy to do its job Ilana Redstone and John Villasenor

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2021/01/12/the-danger-of-unassailable-ideas/

Open inquiry is supposed to be the foundation of the academic endeavor. And yet today, that endeavor is constrained by a set of unacknowledged beliefs that administrators, faculty and students at colleges and universities increasingly treat as unassailable truths.

As we argue in our new book, Unassailable Ideas, many of these beliefs have in recent decades migrated from the edge of academia to its very center. Three of these beliefs in particular now shape how the academy conceptualizes research, teaching and its administrative role, a phenomenon that restricts how classes are taught, which questions can be asked and how problems are solved.

The first of these beliefs is that any effort that aims to undermine traditional frameworks is automatically viewed as good. In making this claim, our aim is not to mount a defense of conventional discriminatory power structures. However, it should be possible to rightly condemn them and simultaneously point out that not all efforts designed to fight against them are well thought-out. Sometimes the goals of a particular effort will be worthy, but the methods to achieve them won’t be.

The second belief is that discrimination is the cause of all unequal group outcomes. In other words, absent discrimination, all intergroup differences in representation in various aspects of life—from education to family structure to employment—would cease to exist. While discrimination is clearly a force that should be combated, this second belief precludes any consideration of the potential role of preferences, priorities and culture that might also play a contributing role.

The third belief is in the primacy of identity, where identity is defined by attributes such as race, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, etc. We are not suggesting that identity along these lines isn’t important: it is. Rather, we are suggesting that there can also be value in non-identity-centered perspectives.

Lying About Obama A new biography uncovers the facts behind the fake news. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/lying-about-obama-bruce-bawer/

Jack Cashill has written over a dozen books, including two about the mysterious 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800, one about the Trayvon Martin case, and two – now three – about Barack Obama. His new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is a definitive account not only of Obama’s eight years in office but also of the transformation of most mainstream American political journalists, largely during the Obama era, from relatively objective reporters of the facts – emphasis on “relatively” – to dedicated partisans of the left, ready and eager at every turn to cover up unpleasant truths (however important) about Democrats and to promote outrageous lies (however destructive) about Republicans.

Fortunately, in the age of the Internet, the mainstream media have competition. Yes, there are scads of people who purvey nonsense online. But there are also serious writers who are devoted not to the Democratic Party narrative but to the facts. Some of them have worked in the mainstream media only to lose their jobs because of their excessive curiosity about matters that their bosses considered off-limits. Ken Timmerman, a Clinton voter in 1992, was fired by Time when, in 1994, he “followed the facts on the China trade to the doors of the Oval Office.” Sharyl Attkisson’s interest in the Benghazi story forced her out of CBS News. Both kept writing, but for less prestigious – and less lucrative – outlets. Cashill calls these non-mainstream writers “Lilliputians” (for the teeny-weeny people, of course, in Gulliver’s Travels) and describes them as members of the new American samizdat, borrowing the Russian word used in Soviet times to denote, as he puts it, “the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.”

Book Review: America’s Covert Border War Andrew Harrod

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/02/inside-americas-counter-jihad-covert-border-war#comment-2319899

Inside America’s Counter-Jihad Covert Border War

Contrary to America’s Leftists, “that jihadists would infiltrate land borders among bedraggled war refugees” is not an “outrageous fantasy of fringe racists, nativist immigration restrictionists, and conspiracy lunatics.” So writes Center for Immigration Studies National Security Fellow Todd Bensman in his revealing new book examining America’s Covert Border War: The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration.

Bensman is an experienced observer of his subject. This former Texas journalist became in 2009 a senior intelligence analyst with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. With federal security clearance, he worked firsthand with federal agents in Texas government “fusion center” on border security issues.

Particularly since Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have worried about terrorist threats breaching America’s southern border, Bensman has documented. With bipartisan backing, officials have “deployed an internationally expansive, ambitious, and somehow almost entirely unreported counterterrorism enterprise at the border and along its Latin American approaches.” Yet this machinery “just became a victim of its own success in preventing jihadist attack” and has gone largely unnoticed.

Bill Gates’s Climate Hysteria By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/bill-gatess-climate-hysteria/

In a recent interview, he relies on fearmongering, cherry-picking, and dire predictions to make his climate-change agenda appear more palatable.

T his past Sunday, Bill Gates (net worth, $133 billion) and Anderson Cooper ($110 million) got together on 60 Minutes to discuss the numerous sacrifices Americans will be expected to make to avert an imminent climate catastrophe.

First, we should refrain from referring to these sorts of conversations as “journalism,” since Cooper never challenges any of Gates’s wild predictions nor displays even a hint of professional skepticism regarding the subject matter. Cooper simply cues up the next talking point like a host of an in-house corporate video.

Gates, who has a new book out called “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” told Cooper that he believes that climate change “is the toughest challenge humanity has ever faced,” and wealthy nations — not China or India, one assumes — must get to zero carbon emissions by 2050 or the world is basically kaput. Not 40 percent. Not five. Zero. Elsewhere in the interview, Gates called for a nationalistic “all-out effort, you know, like a world war, but it’s us against greenhouse gases.”

Americans use over 20 million barrels of petroleum products every day — now more abundant and easier to extract than ever before — so, unless some completely new technology emerges, it will take a fascistic technocracy to win this conflict. Now, I don’t use “fascistic” lightly here. Nor am I suggesting that Gates envisions goose-stepping Gestapo agents banging on your door every time you set the air conditioner below 75 degrees. And, anyway, what kind of monster would own an air conditioner with an extinction-level threat hanging over humanity? He does, however, envision the state dictating virtually every decision made by industry that relates to carbon emissions — which is to say the entire economy. If there is a more precise phrase that describes a state-controlled economy that directs both private and public ownership over the means of production during wartime, I will be happy to use it.