RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-memoir-blames-republicans-right-wing-media-for-nursing-home-coronavirus-controversy/

New York governor Andrew Cuomo in his new memoir blames conservatives and right-wing media for the controversy over coronavirus outbreaks in the state’s nursing homes.

Around 6,700 nursing home residents in New York were known to have died of COVID-19. However, if a nursing home resident dies in a hospital, the state does not record that casualty as a “nursing home” death.

This has led to speculation that coronavirus deaths among New York nursing home residents is higher than reported. A June analysis by the Empire Center, an Albany-based think tank, found that it was more likely that 10,000 nursing home residents had died of COVID-19 up to that time.

Critics have charged that New York’s outbreak was worsened by a March 25 executive order, signed by Governor Cuomo and approved by New York health commissioner Howard Zucker, requiring nursing homes to readmit residents even if they were infected with coronavirus. Cuomo has repeatedly dismissed concerns about the executive order.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/who_will_have_written_obamas_new_book_not_obama.html

When the first half of Barack Obama’s long overdue memoir, Promised Land, is published on November 17, I expect to receive calls like the one I received in the spring of 2011.  That call came from a fellow named Michael Cohen.  I did not recognize the name at the time.  Nor did I know how Cohen got my cell number.  He explained that he was the attorney for Donald Trump — I did recognize that name — and he wanted to know what I knew about Barack Obama’s origins.

Ever since I first started questioning the authorship of Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, I would occasionally get calls like this from people of a higher pay grade than mine.  Having followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance, I recommended instead that Trump focus on the authorship question.  As I explained to Cohen, although Obama claimed to have written both his books by himself, he definitely had help, much of it from terrorist turned educator Bill Ayers.  This I deduced from my literary forensic work in the summer and fall of 2008.

Mainstream biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers’s involvement in his Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.  Andersen’s sources in Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself deeply in debt and “hopelessly blocked.”  At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”

What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer” as evident in his 1993 book To Teach.  Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”  Ayers himself took credit for Dreams on multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/how-socialism-will-trash-your-life-mark-tapson/

Socialism is all the rage among young Americans these days. Not the kind of socialism that has never worked anywhere in history. Not the kind that drove Venezuela from South America’s most prosperous economy into a failed state in a mere two decades. Not the kind that wreaked essentially the same havoc upon once-thriving Cuba. Not those real-world examples, but the new-and-improved, democratic socialism, which, as MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle recently assured viewers, is “a lot different” from those other forms of socialism.

Those young Americans who are enamored of such icons of democratic socialism as lifelong communist Sen. Bernie Sanders and economics-challenged, radical Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez desperately need to read Paul H. Rubin’s short but vital book A Student’s Guide to Socialism: How It Will Trash Your Lives, a joint publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Bombardier Books, an imprint of Post Hill Press.

As the title indicates, the book is aimed at young readers and is thus a quick, easy read, tailored to their tragically short attention spans and tenuous grasp of economics. Its purpose is not simply to rehash abstract, theoretical points of contrast between socialism and capitalism, but to explain to those uninformed (or misinformed) young people exactly how socialism would impact them and affect their future if it were actually to be adopted here in the United States, as polls indicate an alarming percentage of young people would prefer. Put simply, it answers the question, “What will my life be like if I live under socialism?”

Mr. Rubin is Emeritus Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and a former economic advisor in D.C., including for the Reagan administration as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. The author of a dozen books and dozens of Wall St. Journal op-eds, Rubin not only knows whereof he speaks but knows how to communicate economic ideas in clear, jargon-free, unbiased language – a skill that eludes most academics and economists. In A Student’s Guide to Socialism, Rubin shrewdly chose not to speak down to, or talk over the heads of, the audience who most needs to absorb his message that life under socialism will not be the egalitarian utopia its adherents fantasize. On the contrary, as the book’s own subtitle bluntly tells readers, “it will trash your lives.”

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/the-accidental-defender-of-the-constitutio

It is fair to say that Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power is a book Yoo never thought he’d write. Fair because he says so himself, right up front: “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.”
A Review of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, by John Yoo, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250269577.

Decades from now, when historians assess Donald Trump’s presidency with sobriety and dispassion, the ironies are apt to stand out most. Donald Trump is the populist who lost the popular vote, owing his ascendancy to the Electoral College, an institution designed to temper popular excesses and which Trump himself, while pondering a presidential bid in 2012, rebuked as “a disaster for democracy.” Trump has been condemned as the Constitution’s scourge by progressives for whom the Constitution is mostly a nuisance to evolve beyond, framed by white racists in a time before Wokeness. Trump is the president who upheld the rule of law by firing the FBI director. He submitted to investigation by a special counsel whom he reviled but who nevertheless cleared him. Trump was impeached anyway by Democrats who were pushed into the exercise by partisans. But Democratic partisanship proved so devoid of appeal outside the activist Left that impeachment, though it happened just a few months earlier, rated nary a mention in the Democratic National Convention.

Is it any wonder that these four years have aged most of us tenfold?

We’re not through with the ironies, though. For present purposes, here is the most striking one: Through all of this, President Trump’s most compelling defender may be John Yoo, a brilliant conservative thinker who appeared to have both feet firmly planted in Camp Never Trump when the president took office in 2017.

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s Berkeley Law School, where it is not easy to be a conservative academic, but anti-Trumpers are welcome. Professor Yoo is a nonpareil scholar of the presidency—in particular, of executive power as conceived in the Constitution and practiced through more than two centuries. He is a prolific author, his grasp of his core concentration immeasurably enhanced by service as a high-ranking Justice Department official. He played a pivotal role in national security policy development in the post-9/11 era, when President George W. Bush grappled with the vexing challenges of international jihadism, often with ferocious partisan opposition in Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/three-cheers-land-hope-bruce-bawer/

We are living through a year when the consequences of more than a generation of poor parenting and terrible education can be observed, in all their odiousness, in the streets of American cities. The young rioters, vandals, bullies, thugs, arsonists, and statue-topplers who pose as anti-fascists and racial-justice warriors do not just hate Confederate Civil War generals and certain specific institutions that, after sober and informed consideration, they have judged to be ethically inexcusable; they hate our country itself, and they hate its history, every bit of it, although they actually know next to nothing about either the country or its history.

As they take to, and take over, the streets – destroying where they are incapable of contributing, and harming and abusing many of those on whose behalf they claim to be protesting – these cruel, callow agitators are venting a rage that they themselves do not even understand and are targeting it at strangers who have done nothing whatsoever to harm them. Though they do not realize it, the people at whom this fury should properly be directed are, first, their overindulgent parents who refused to place the strictures upon them that most children desperately want and need, and, second, the ideologically driven teachers and professors who told them repeatedly over the years that America is irredeemably evil and that there is nothing they can do about that fact other than to tear the whole thing down.

To an extraordinary extent, the picture of America that exists inside these brats’ heads is the product of a single monumentally mendacious book – namely, The People’s History of the United States by the late Communist writer Howard Zinn, which has for years (thanks in part to some educators’ determination to indoctrinate and in part to the staggering neglect on the part of parents and politicians alike) been the default American history text in countless high-school and college classrooms.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/beyond-woke-mark-tapson/

Like many other linguistic irritants the left has introduced into our cultural lexicon, “woke” has become a household term seemingly overnight. It is generally understood to refer to some kind of Progressive state of self-righteous enlightenment, but what is its origin? How and why does one become woke, and what, if anything, lies beyond this condition? What are the philosophical underpinnings of this social justice religion? If you want to truly understand it and not simply dismiss it with an eyeroll, you can hardly do better than to look to writer, philosopher, poet, and former New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. Few contemporary scholars have researched the left’s totalitarian mindset more deeply, and elucidated it so thoroughly, as he.

In January of 2018 I interviewed Michael Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag here about being outed as “the Deplorable Prof,” the man behind an anonymous Twitter account which he used to criticize the “anti-education and anti-intellectual” social justice ideology of his (at the time) fellow leftist academics. The subsequent shunning and harassment he endured from his colleagues and the NYU administration drove Rectenwald to declare himself officially done with the left. He later published a book about it titled Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage (which I reviewed for FrontPage Mag here) from the fine people at New English Review Press. The book is a must-read for understanding how identity politics has, as Rectenwald put it, eroded academic integrity and intellectual rigor in the American university.

Rectenwald quickly went on to publish another short but vital work, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (I interviewed him about that one, which you can read here). In this book he argues successfully that the “Big Digital” technologies and their principals like Google represent a new form of corporate state power and leftist authoritarianism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/blackout-vs-white-fragility-daniel-greenfield/

White Fragility, a racist tract by Robin DiAngelo, a white leftist, has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of a million copies. It’s been praised by Democrats, assigned on Fortune 500 corporate reading lists, and DiAngelo commands speaking fees as high as $20,000.

Blackout by Candace Owens won’t show up at your local critical race theory seminar. The conservative activist isn’t welcome because she tells the truth about racism and its profiteers. Where DiAngelo has a  PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Washington, Owens has a degree in experiencing real-life racism that the Seattle institution can’t offer.

Owens doesn’t have a Ph.D. in Multicultural Education; instead, as she writes of her childhood, she grew up as part of ”a family of six” in a “small, three-bedroom apartment within a run-down, roach-infested building” where “fistfights, police visits, and drama were commonplace.”

To DiAngelo, racism is about the experience of being white. Black people exist in DiAngelo’s world as objects, not subjects, casting light on the elemental evil of whiteness. To be white is to be racist, while being black means being the victim of white racism. Black people only matter as weapons in a struggle between white people over the meaning of race, nationhood, and justice.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/marsha_blackburn_explores_the_mind_of_a_conservative_woman.html

The Mind of a Conservative Woman by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is an insightful commentary for all women regardless of their political affiliation.  Blackburn delves into maintaining the traditions of family, freedom, faith, a free market, and respecting those with differing opinions. 

She exclaimed, “Nearly a decade ago, I wrote the book, Life Equity.  My literary agent told me I should write a second book.  I laid out the premise of the new book.  I thought how women in the public eye elevated to office told me that conservative women are treated differently than liberal women.  The mainstream media will elevate liberal women yet mock and diminish conservative women.”

Fairness is not always prevalent.  What the senator wants is an even playing field.  “In my book, there is a chapter where I discuss how the liberals want everybody to spout their talking points even if someone is not in complete agreement.  Some of the liberal women’s organizations sent an open letter to all of the newsrooms.  It explained how people should talk to a female vice presidential candidate — basically, what could and could not be said and how to approach them.  I fired off a letter to all of the signatories and all of the newsrooms, stating that this treatment should apply to all women.  Of course, I got zero response on my letter.”

The book encourages women to believe in themselves, think for themselves, and strive to be the best they can to succeed.  “When I would speak to groups of women, they would always tell me during a Q&A how they considered themselves independent, neither a Democrat or Republican.  They want to make up their minds about an issue by doing research.  I would ask them to consider the Constitution, rule of law, justice, equality, equal treatment, and to have government get off people’s backs.  I emphasized how I want to make decisions on education and health care for my children, not the government.  As I say in my book, no one should think that an American woman is too weak and stupid to handle their own life.”