RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/02/02/andy-ngo-unmasks-antifa-in-new-book-and-warns-antifa-lives-and-thrives-only-if-america-dies-n1422325

Antifa is the muscle, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other non-profits help pick the targets, and anyone who points out their totalitarian intolerance is called a fascist, promptly canceled, or burned in effigy. That’s the crazy Leftist triangulation playing out these days on the streets of Portland and in many other riot-prone American cities. Journalist Andy Ngo knows this all too well.

The angry red communist comrades of antifa and BLM have tried to cancel the Portland-based journalist but Ngo told PJ Media that it obviously hasn’t worked out too well for them. Antifa “protesters” beat him senseless and sent him to the hospital with brain damage in 2019, engaged in a sustained smear campaign against him due to his coverage of the group, and basically put out a hit on him, but Andy Ngo’s still standing. And thriving.

Instead of being canceled, Ngo wrote a book about antifa and BLM. Unmasked: Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy has just hit bookstores.

Though I’ve watched the Portland protest scene go from the chill Friday-at-4 drum circles to shrieking animal rights protesters, Occupy encampments, May Day melees, and antifa trying to burn down my hometown, Ngo’s book is a valuable resource and well told.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/lessons-least-these-jason-d-hill/

At the heart of charity lies a great deal of moral sadism. For many left-liberals who stake the moral meaning and purpose of their lives on relieving black suffering in order for their own lives to have continued meaning and purpose, they not only must see black people suffer, but they must also create policies that perpetuate black poverty and block the initiatives of blacks in their efforts towards self-reliance.

If black individuals dare to reject the victim-narrative on which charity and welfare are dependent in order to gain the Left’s philosophical legitimacy, it means they have not allowed their agency to be expropriated, and instead will rely on the virtues of their own character and their own capabilities for their uplift. Blacks who have the temerity to effect this effrontery against the managerial liberal welfare class have identified the moral hypocrisy of people who pretend they want to help, but whose real purpose is racial exploitation and power lust. These left-liberals need blacks to suffer so they can gain moral atonement and redemption in the amelioration of that suffering. But what if blacks never had to suffer — and don’t need to?

What if poor blacks, former gang members and drug addicts, welfare recipients and prostitutes had a credo and philosophy—superlative guiding principles by which to live such that they would be weaned from the dependency on welfare and from the elitist experts and managerial classes who claim to know how best to solve their problems? What if the engines of change came from blacks themselves, and any helping hand extended to them was not based on charity but, rather, one based on the trader principle? That is, help based on principles of reciprocity that guide the philanthropic exchange just as it guides exchanges in the market. In other words, anyone helping others regardless of background should be told: never do more for them than they are willing to do for themselves.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-farce-of-the-nobel-peace-prize

Betraying the Nobel: The Secrets and Corruption Behind the Nobel Peace Prize

Unni Turrettini, with a foreword by Michael Nobel

Pegasus, pp. 304, £20

Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel Family Society for 15 years, Michael believes that the Nobel Peace Institute has betrayed the ‘original conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will and intentions’. Its selection process is ‘very sketchy’ and its committee of Norwegian parliamentarians reflects the balance of power in their parliament. Its awards follow ‘personal interests’, ‘political and national considerations’ and ‘human rights or global warming’, all of which have ‘little or nothing’ to do with Alfred Nobel’s bequest.

The Prize was a dynamite idea when it was founded in 1900. What better way to avoid war than to recycle the profits from explosives into an incentive scheme for perpetual peace? But, as Unni Turrettini describes in her efficient and quietly devastating account, the Peace Prize soon fell to secret horse-trading, moral grandstanding and what one Norwegian parliamentarian calls ‘the privatisation of foreign policy’.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish engineer who had stabilised nitroglycerine in 1863, began selling it to miners as ‘Safety Powder’ in 1867. Safety Powder created the St Gotthard tunnel through the Alps. It also killed Tsar Alexander II when assassins lobbed a dynamite-filled bomb at his carriage. Nobel died in San Remo in 1896, aged 63. Childless and unhappy — his mother had blocked a love match with Bertha Kinsky, an idealistic Russian countess — the ‘Dynamite King’ bequeathed annual prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and literature, to be administrated by apolitical Swedish institutions; the Karolinska Institute, a medical university, awards the medicine prize. A fifth, in memory of Bertha’s values, was to be granted by the Norwegian parliament.

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-peter-woods-critique-of-1619-project

1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, by Peter W. Wood (Encounter Books, 272 pp., $28.99)

In August 2019, the New York Times magazine published the “1619 Project.” This series of essays and articles provided readers with many “facts” that they may not have known: that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery; that Abraham Lincoln was a racist; that America’s foundational premise was “slavocracy;” that present-day American wealth is a direct consequence of slavery; and that the essential pattern of our history is not one of unprecedented growth in freedom and democracy but institutional hatred and oppression of blacks.

If you were unfamiliar with these facts, there is good reason—none are true. As National Association of Scholars president Peter W. Wood reveals in 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, the larger purpose of the Times’s project appears to have been to promote racial grievances and resentment. Most damningly, Wood points out that a Times fact-checker who contacted a radical historian to weigh the claim that the revolution was fought to protect slavery was told that this was nonsense. But the paper ignored that input, and 1619’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, herself recently said that the project was not intended to serve as history (after nearly a year of claiming the opposite).

Wood’s 1620 is an extraordinary book. Readers looking for a polemic should be forewarned: it is a learned and thoughtful investigation of the topic, and Wood goes to considerable lengths to give a hearing to Hannah-Jones’s assertions. In doing so, he systematically demolishes all but one of them.

Wood makes a convincing case against the 1619 Project’s contention that Lincoln was a racist who was merely opposed to slavery’s cruelty. He acknowledges that Lincoln was a politician and, as such, capable of being quite guarded about his ultimate aims, thus making a definitive argument hard to present. So, while Wood concedes the well-known fact that Lincoln had a meeting with black leaders in 1862 to discuss repatriating freed blacks back to Africa, he points out that the president made the unusual and seemingly calculated gesture of inviting a reporter to attend. This suggests that it was for show, intended to allay concerns among some whites that he sought abolition and racial equality. Yet Wood notes that Lincoln had said that the Declaration of Independence’s phrase “all men are created equal” should actually include all men, and that he publicly and controversially endorsed a constitutional amendment for African-American voting at the end of his life.

https://tikvahfund.org/ajj-ebook/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIo_3i6fGM7gIVEPLICh1RsguOEAEYASAAEgIHjvD_BwE
One respected the Jews. One despised them. They both protected their religious liberty.

In July of 1776, a group of 56 men signed a document signifying the birth of a brand-new nation. This assembly of founders was seemingly in no way connected with the Jews, Judaism, or ancient Hebrew culture. But John Adams argued that Jewish concepts and principles permeate the framework of the American government — perhaps more than you might realize.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams disagreed on the contributions of the Jewish people — yet they protected the religious liberties of both Jew and Gentile. Why?

In this new e-book from the Tikvah Fund, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik examines Adams’ and Jefferson’s writings about the Jewish people, their teachings, and impact. With him you will explore:

How did the history, heritage, and practices of the Jewish people influence these two men and the foundation of our country?
How did the concepts of monotheism, morality, and divine intervention impact their thought?
Can the American Revolution be categorized as an achievement of Judaism?
What can this history teach us about the foundations and preservation of our religious liberty today?

Find out by reading Adams, Jefferson, and the Jews.

https://www.amazon.com/UNREPORTED-TRUTHS-ABOUT-COVID-19-LOCKDOWNS/dp/1953039103/ref=zg_bsnr_books_53?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RBY8TCS8A4MX1CT3XESD

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson offers all a combined version of three booklets in the controversial and best-selling Unreported Truths about Covid series – at one low price.Since the publication of the first booklet in June, Unreported Truths has offered an honest counterpart to over-the-top media coverage about the risks of the coronavirus and ways to stop it. Part 1 focused on the ways governments count and report Covid-19 deaths. Part 2 covered the history of lockdowns and the evidence that they work – or don’t. And Part 3 gave the same treatment to masks and mask mandates.All three booklets draw on primary sources like Centers for Disease Control reports, news articles, and scientific papers – and all three offer direct links to the material so that you the reader can judge it for yourself.With a quarter-million copies sold, Unreported Truths has become an independent journalism phenomenon. And as the fight over our response to Covid drags on, knowing the facts is more important than ever! Now, for the first time, all three booklets are available in a single package. Whether you are wondering about the series, have read one booklet but are interested in the others, or simply want them together for convenience, the Combined Edition offers fresh flexibility.With a new introduction!