RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/29/meet-the-democrats-newest-strategist/

Her name is Vicky Osterweil. It’s a pity that she is only emerging on the scene now. Had her ideas enjoyed broad circulation even a month ago, she could have made a major and clarifying contribution to the Democratic Party’s platform.

Many commentators, from the Left as well as the Right, grumbled that the Democrats’ convention lacked a clear policy agenda. Sure, we all knew in general outline what they were about—they were “against racism,” “against white supremacism,” above all, they were “against Trump.” 

But the policy particulars that flowed from these sentiments were more adumbrated than stated directly. Vicky Osterweil (formerly Willie) fills in some blanks. Too bad she didn’t have a spot speaking at the convention. She sums up so much of what the Democrats are about today.

Like Joe Biden (and like his mentor Barack Obama), she is passionately committed to “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Peeking out of his basement in May, Joe Biden saw “an incredible opportunity to transform America.” 

Vicky Osterweil agrees. “[W]e need a total transformation of our society,” she writes in her new book. “This society we live in under capitalism is entirely structured around the production [and] circulation of commodities. It is a cruel system, built for the creation and revocation of things not for the flourishing of people.”

In her interview with Stephen Colbert earlier this month, Joe Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris cheerfully noted that the “protests” coruscating across the country were “not going to stop.” “This is a movement,” she explained, smiling. The riots “are not going to let up and they should not and we should not.” 

Osterweil sees Harris’ bet and raises it. She, too, regards the riots as part of a “movement for liberation,” a movement that is just getting started. 

I mentioned Osterweil’s new book. It is called In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. I should note that the word “riotous” as used here does not mean “uproariously funny.” In means “having to do with riots,” i.e., violent insurrectionary action: looting, destroying property, burning things down. These are the actions that Osterweil recommends to bring about that “total” or “fundamental” transformation of society that she, like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, long to bring about. 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/29/new-book-provides-a-terrifying-glimpse-into-how-antifa-justifies-looting-and-rioting-n864754

After the police killing of George Floyd, mobs descended on major cities, rioting, looting, and burning down buildings. Yet left-leaning journalists, commentators, and politicians insisted that the riots were “mostly peaceful protests.” A new book seeks to justify looting, in particular, and taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) published a lengthy interview with the author. Among other things, the author defends looting as a way to undermine the “white supremacy” behind the idea of property and that the value of small businesses is a “right-wing myth.”

NPR’s Natalie Escobar introduced the subject by claiming “there has been a lot of hand-wringing about looting.” In the newly-released book In Defense of Looting, (published by Hachette Book Group, which has published books by Joel Osteen, J.K. Rowling, Newt Gingrich, and others) Vicky Osterweil “argues that looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society. The rioters who smash windows and take items from stores, she says, are engaging in a powerful tactic that questions the justice of ‘law and order,’ and the distribution of property and wealth in an unequal society.”

Indeed, in an interview with Escobar, Osterweil claimed that looting — which she defined as “the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot” — is a tool for justice that doesn’t really harm anyone. She also dispelled certain “myths” about looting, like the idea that rioters and looters are disconnected from a peaceful protest.

Attacking the idea of property

https://fee.org/articles/andrew-cuomo-s-book-deal-and-why-the-worst-rise-to-the-top-in-politics/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FEE-Freeman+%28Foundation+for+Economic+Education+-+Latest+Articles%29

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the state of New York especially hard. Almost 33,000 New Yorkers have died from the virus, more total deaths than any other state in the country. And New York ranks as the second-worst state for deaths when adjusted for population. The Empire State alone accounts for one in five coronavirus deaths in the US despite having only around six percent of the nation’s population.

Why did New York fare so poorly?

Well, the coronavirus is far more lethal for older people. How well a state has mitigated the death count closely corresponds with how well they protected elderly, vulnerable populations. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo mandated that nursing homes accept patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 even if it means exposing their residents to the virus.

Yes, you read that right.

It shouldn’t come as a shock, then, that at least 6,600 of the state’s deaths happened in nursing homes. And this is almost certainly an undercount, as the Associated Press says it could be more like 11,000 when you adjust for the odd way in which New York defined its deaths. (The AP described New York’s death toll as “cloaked in secrecy” and even Democratic state legislators have accused the state of trying to cover up the number of nursing home deaths).

Of course this is what would happen if you force institutions housing the elderly to accept carriers of a virus that is highly lethal for older people. Other states such as Florida did the opposite. By barring COVID-19 positive patients from nursing homes, they escaped thousands of deaths.

Worse, Cuomo has refused to allow an independent investigation into his handling of the nursing home debacle despite bipartisan calls for oversight.

From start to finish, Cuomo botched the COVID-19 response woefully. National Review’s Kyle Smith summarized the governor’s mistakes “breathtakingly bad moves” that “in retrospect amounted to catastrophe.”

No informed American ought to be surprised by the cultural revolution of 2020.

America’s Hundred Year War: Red October 1917-Red November 2020 reveals the rise, “fall,” and the resurgence of communism in America. It is the story of a century of communist political operations among America’s cultural elites from Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Xi Jinping’s penetration of Hollywood, corporations, universities and media.

The outcomes are Antifa and BLM riots burning Democrat cities over issues of capitalism and race, the socialist platform of the Democrat Party, and Red November elections for President, House and Senate.

America’s Hundred Year War captures the long march of Communism through American cultural institutions from the Red October of 1917 to the Red November 2020.

The book highlights the major personalities and events in the struggle between American culture and Communism. Prominent American intellectuals, actors/writers, and journalists are inspired by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Xi Jinping. They see a brighter future outside of American values and institutions. Anti-communism and reverence for America faded away.

The story begins in the year 1948, focusing on a spirited dialogue between Whittaker Chambers, Richard Nixon and Alger Hiss before the House committee on Un-American Activities in August 1948. The story then flashes back to the Red October of 1917 and forward into the Red November of 2020. There are major stopovers in The Russian Revolution, WWI, WWII, Vietnam culminating in consequences of 2020. 

Chambers, Nixon, Hiss and their friends and allies speak for their own versions of history. 

The book has a detailed INDEX of major events and words and deeds of the named protagonists and antagonists.

Roger Canfield, Ph.D.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-rise-of-mohammed-bin-salman-11597931772

The models arrived first. Boats carrying some 150 women, from Brazil, Russia and elsewhere, docked in the summer of 2015 at Velaa Private Island, an opulent Maldives resort. Upon arrival, each woman was driven in a golf cart to a clinic, tested for sexually transmitted diseases and settled into a private villa.

The women were due to spend the better part of a month with their hosts, several dozen friends of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for a party marking his ascent. A 29-year-old prince with a taste for opulence, a hunger for money and a need for power found himself with an abundance of all three.

Prince Mohammed had worked doggedly for a year, outmaneuvering rivals and easing the path for his septuagenarian father Salman to assume the Saudi throne. After Salman took the crown in early 2015, he delegated extraordinary powers to Mohammed, who consolidated control of the military and security services and began upending the sleepy kingdom’s oil-dependent economy.

By that July, Mohammed wanted a break. His privacy-obsessed entourage booked the entire Velaa resort for a month, at a cost of $50 million, according to people familiar with the trip. Staff were banned from bringing cellphones with cameras. The American rapper Pitbull and the South Korean pop star Psy performed. The Maldives party was described by several people in attendance, including some involved in its planning.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/book_of_the_week/2020/08/19/book_of_the_week_reclaiming_common_sense_574721.html

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this RealClearBooks series, we highlight recent nonfiction books from across the political spectrum. This week’s book is Robert Curry’s ‘Reclaiming Common Sense’, published by Encounter Books.

In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age, Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, Robert Curry describes a war on reality that spilled from the academy into all corners of American life and scrambled our rational mind in the process.

Though BLM, gender, and environmental activists often dominate our post-truth headlines, the left’s war on common sense is not merely intended to advance noisy progressive pet schemes. In fact, Curry reveals, subverting the truth as we know it is central to a far a more insidious plot to erode and eliminate the very conditions that make our Constitution work. For, as Curry writes, a war on reason is a war on the mind itself, and with it our capacities to think clearly and govern ourselves.

In a series of thoughtful vignettes, Curry urges Americans to preserve our fragile republic by restoring the common-sense realism that informed our Founders and grounded our nation as a shared project. These wise passages are essential reading for those who see and feel America drifting into a surreal state. In fact, as Reclaiming Common Sense underscores, those perceptive powers are the very thing that unite us and make our experiment in self-rule possible. Don’t let them go.