RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Although marching to your own drummer has its downsides, both personally and professionally, it also made me no stranger to controversy.”  Thomas Sowell 1930 A Personal Odyssey, 2000

This memoir was written twenty years ago, so some will have read it. I had not. Sowell is a man I have long admired for his independent thinking on many issues. Trained as an economist, he writes as well on education and race, and of how politics, protests and policy prescriptions influenced his thinking.

Like Odysseus’ return from Troy, we follow him from birth and young boyhood in rural North Carolina, through his school years in Harlem, and his leaving home at age seventeen. We follow him into the Marine Corps, and we learn of his years in college and graduate school, of marriage and children. We read of his years of teaching, writing and thinking, and, finally to his Ithaca, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he researches and writes – a passage through trials to triumph.

He was born in 1930. His father died before he arrived and his mother, who could not afford to feed and care for him, had to give him up to his father’s Aunt Molly. The poverty in which he lived was bleak. His first home: “Like most of the houses in the area, ours had no such frills as electricity, central heating, or hot running water…The toilet was a little shed on the back porch.” At age nine, his family moved to New York City, to a shared apartment in Harlem. In 1944, his intelligence got him admitted to Stuyvesant High School where he first spent time with white children. But he quit before graduation. He worked and went into the Marine Corps: “Never in my life did race mean less than during those two months at Parris Island. The Drill Instructors saw their job as making everybody miserable, and they did so without regard to race, color, creed or national origin.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/woke-supremacy-mark-tapson/

If you are familiar with the wit and wisdom of conservative philosopher and comedian Evan Sayet from his first book, KinderGarden Of Eden: How the Modern Liberal Thinks, or his lecture to the Heritage Foundation on the same topic – the most-viewed lecture in Heritage history, which the late Andrew Breitbart called “one of the five most important conservative speeches ever given” – or his illustrated faux children’s tale about climate change, Apocali Now, or his standup performances, then you know what an incisive and entertaining perspective Sayet brings to our national political conversation.

Now Sayet has authored a brand new, must-read book about the current political landscape: The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto, available now. FrontPage Mag is proud to publish the following exclusive excerpt. Check it out below, and get your copy of Evan Sayet’s The Woke Supremacy:

Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by … – Amazon.com
https://www.amazon.com/Profiles-Corruption-Abuse-audio-cd/dp/1094149683

www.amazon.com › Profiles-Corruption-Abuse-audio-cd

Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite Audio CD … Washington insiders operate by a proven credo: when a Peter Schweizer book … pursuit of capitalist gains, Kamala Harris who appears to be a very dirty cop.

Washington insiders operate by a proven credo: when a Peter Schweizer book drops, duck and brace for impact.

For over a decade, the work of five-time New York Times bestselling investigative reporter Peter Schweizer has sent shockwaves through the political universe.

Now Schweizer and his team of seasoned investigators turn their focus to the nation’s top progressives—politicians who strive to acquire more government power to achieve their political ends.

Can they be trusted with more power?

In Profiles in Corruption, Schweizer offers a deep-dive investigation into the private finances, and secrets deals of some of America’s top political leaders. And, as usual, he doesn’t disappoint, with never-before-reported revelations that uncover corruption and abuse of power—all backed up by a mountain of corporate documents and legal filings from around the globe.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/10/unmasking_obama_also_exposes_the_corrupt_media_143916.html

A slew of political books will be hitting bookshelves between now and Election Day, covering everything on the spectrum from communist propaganda to Trump hagiography.

Many of those books, such as Sean Hannity’s “Live Free or Die,” will make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers. Some have the potential to influence the election, such as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s attempt at reputation rehabilitation titled “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.” Yet in this onslaught of new titles, literally dozens of which will attempt to capitalize on the 2020 election frenzy, there will be a few small polished gems that may be lost in the fray. One such could be Jack Cashill’s “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency” (Post Hill Press, 249 pages, available for pre-order now).

A slew of political books will be hitting bookshelves between now and Election Day, covering everything on the spectrum from communist propaganda to Trump hagiography.

Many of those books, such as Sean Hannity’s “Live Free or Die,” will make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers. Some have the potential to influence the election, such as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s attempt at reputation rehabilitation titled “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.” Yet in this onslaught of new titles, literally dozens of which will attempt to capitalize on the 2020 election frenzy, there will be a few small polished gems that may be lost in the fray. One such could be Jack Cashill’s “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency” (Post Hill Press, 249 pages, available for pre-order now).

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/russia-collusion-hoax-decade-deceit-and-advent-new-info

Robert Mueller had been at the witness table several long hours when Rep. Will Hurd finally chimed in. Now in his mid-70s, Mueller, the Justice Department special counsel who oversaw the Trump-Russia probe was not quite the same crisp-speaking Marine whom Americans had come to know as their FBI director during the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks through his retirement in 2013.

But his experience still loomed as an asset, especially when it came to the art of refusing to bite on politically loaded questions. He had just finished a five-minute, rapid-fire round of questions from Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) that clearly had frustrated the Democrat’s effort to pin him down on questions about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen.

Mueller’s answers were classic dodges. “I can’t adopt your characterization,” he answered Castro at one moment. The next, he added: “I can’t speak to that.” A few seconds later he threw in “I’m not certain I could go that far,” and finished with, “I defer to you on that….I can’t get into details….I can’t speak to that.” Castro yielded back his time, unsatisfied by his effort to get Mueller to bite on his preferred story line.

Hurd, a Republican from Texas, was up next. A former CIA officer, he shared a common intelligence community experience with the former FBI director. But the odds that he would fare better than Castro in extracting new information from Mueller seemed equally long.

https://quillette.com/2020/08/08/george-orwell-and-the-struggle-against-inevitable-bias/

In the bleak post-war Britain of October 1945, an essay by George Orwell appeared in the first edition of Polemic. Edited by abstract artist and ex-Communist Hugh Slater, the new journal was marketed as a “magazine of philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics.” Orwell was not yet famous—Animal Farm had only just started appearing on shelves—but he had a high enough profile for his name to be a boon to a new publication. His contribution to the October 1945 Polemic was “Notes on Nationalism,” one of his best and most important pieces of writing. Amidst the de-Nazification of Germany, the alarmingly rapid slide into the Cold War, and the trials of German and Japanese war criminals, Orwell set out to answer a question which had occupied his mind for most of the past seven years—why do otherwise rational people embrace irrational or even contradictory beliefs about politics?

As a junior colonial official in Burma, the young Eric Blair (he had not yet adopted the name by which he would be known to posterity) had been disgusted by his peers and superiors talking up the British liberty of Magna Carta and Rule Britannia while excusing acts of repression like the massacre of Indian protestors at Amritsar in 1919. As a committed socialist in the late 1930s, he openly ridiculed those who claimed to be champions of the working class while holding actual working-class people in open contempt. And he had watched the British Communist Party insist that the Second World War was nothing more than an imperialist adventure right up until the moment when the first German soldier crossed the Soviet frontier, at which point it instantly became a noble struggle for human freedom.

Orwell’s most personally searing experience, though, had come in Barcelona in 1937. The previous year, he had travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War on the Republican side. His poor relationship with the British Communist Party led him to enlist in the militia of an anti-Stalinist socialist party, the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Even while it was fighting a bitter winter campaign in the Aragon mountains, the POUM was subject to a relentless propaganda campaign by pro-Soviet Republicans who insisted it was a secret front for fascism.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction

The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

https://townhall.com/columnists/williammarshall/2020/08/04/unmasking-obama-a-ne

I am a proud Lilliputian.

Jack Cashill’s wonderful new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, has put me and all my colleagues in conservative media and punditry in the appropriate weight class in his sometimes whimsical, yet always powerful, analysis of the Obama administration.

Cashill accurately equates those of us who have fought for years to dig facts out about the amazingly opaque man, Barack Obama, and his administration with the little inhabitants of Lilliput. Occasionally, we succeed in locating a revelation here or there amidst the murk, busily working away like those diminutive characters in Jonathan Swift’s classic, Gulliver’s Travels. The characterization is especially apt considering the power of our opposition in the monolithic Deep State, which heralded Obama as the next Coming of the Messiah. Those Deep Staters in government, along with their media, Hollywood and Big Tech confederates, did everything possible to protect Obama from scrutiny.

The book does an excellent job of laying out the political/media landscape – the nature and tactics of both those on the political left hell-bent on protecting the beloved Obama and those on the political right seeking to expose him and his agenda. The book is largely an exposition of the corrupt modern mass media. But it is much more.