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BOOKS

Joan Swirsky Interviews author Linda Goudsmit on her recently published opus: The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes: Killing America with ‘Kindness

https://canadafreepress.com/article/joan-swirsky-interviews-author-linda-goudsmit-on-her-recently-published-opu

Joan (JS): Linda…when did you have the blazing insight that what you were witnessing in the politics of American leftists were not sincere efforts to improve the system, but rather elaborate hoaxes designed to destroy our country?  

Linda (LG): From 2017 to 2019––I wrote a number of articles in response to current events. At about the third article, I realized that there was a consistent pattern of leftist political policies that were presented as altruistic, but in  reality were deceitful, tactical, political strategies deliberately designed to collapse––to destroy––America from within. 

JS: Indeed, your book spells out the quite astounding number of 50 Humanitarian Hoaxes! And quite courageously, you identify the culprits you believe are responsible for this malevolent con job on America. I must add here that readers can also access your articles at: lindagoudsmit.com and goudsmit.pundicity.com

LG: Yes, there are many perpetrators of this stealth attack––and malevolence describes its destructiveness. But the Huckster-in-Chief is Barack Hussein Obama who, from his first appearance on the national and international stage, proclaimed his intention to ”fundamentally transform America.” Of course, most Americans had no idea that Obama’s goal was to replace our constitutional republic with socialism. We are witnessing the extraordinary success of his seditious plan today. 

More Praise for Mike Gonzalez’s The Plot to Change America By Roger Clegg

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-praise-for-mike-gonzalezs-the-plot-to-change-america/

This penetrating and insightful book — with the secondary title, “How Identity Politics Is Dividing the Land of the Free” — has already been favorably reviewed by us here. It also features a nice blurb from Rich Lowry (“an incisive, unsparing treatment of identity politics”), as well as from Michael Barone and Ben Shapiro. So it hardly needs my endorsement. But the publication date is this week, and I’d like to add briefly my enthusiastic two cents.

As the title of the earlier NR review indicates, the book’s principal theme is identifying “The Intellectual Roots of Today’s Identity Politics.” A second strong theme — as you would expect from the author, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a Cuban emigre to boot — is a critique of the results of this Left-rooted sickness. And Mr. Gonzalez’s third theme is prescriptive: He aims to answer the question, posed in a different context over 100 years ago by a rather influential leftist, “What is to be done?” As the author succinctly puts it:

To achieve that end [i.e., to defeat the plot to change America], the most urgent tasks are to expose myths, reveal what really happened, explain why it is urgent to change course, and offer a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups, and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the entitlements, we can get rid of identity politics. Explaining all this is this book’s main goal.

That’s from the introduction, by the way; if you’re able to read that (and the conclusion) online, you should, since it will persuade you better than anything I can write to read the rest of the book.

Who Were the Never Trumpers and What Motivated Them? By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/10/who-were-the-never-trumpers-and-what-motivated-them/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, by Robert P. Saldin and Steven M. Teles (Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $27.95)

Slogans and labels serve a crucial purpose in politics, like banners on the battlefield: They rally the faithful to join a particular cause, and to know what cause they are joining. As soon as a cause acquires a name, however, the name becomes equally a term of abuse by its foes. Eventually, the name itself becomes a matter of contention, for both those who claim its ownership and those who seek to avoid its associations. So it is with “Republican,” so it is with “conservative,” so it is with “neoconservative,” and so it is today with “Never Trump.”

For those seeking to understand how the “Never Trump” banner was first raised and why some still claim it for their cause, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles have written an important and useful book. It is not a polemic. The reader will not find a brief against Donald Trump, or an attack on the Never Trumpers — though the book provides fodder for either point of view. Saldin and Teles have a perspective of their own, of course: They clearly believe that standing against Trump’s presidential campaign was the righteous thing for Republicans to do in 2016, and they want to tell the story of why some people did it and others did not. They cite, albeit with a footnoted quibble, political-science work claiming that democratic systems depend for their survival on the Right’s but not the Left’s curbing extremists. Still, the book will not be intolerable for conservative readers, whether they love Trump, hate him, or fall somewhere in between.

Sir Kenneth Clark’s ‘Civilisation’: a guide and celebration :

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/civilisation/2020/07/sir-kenneth-clarks-civilisation/

Fifty-one years ago, when the first Apollo astronauts reached the moon, Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-1983), the eminent British art historian, was invited to the National Gallery in Washington DC to accept a medal for Distinguished Service to Education in Art. He had little idea of the frenzied crowd that would be on hand to welcome him. Clark, a modest and private person, found himself walking the entire length of the gallery amidst thunderous cheering. By the time he reached the speaker’s platform, tears were pouring down his cheeks.

The gallery was filled to capacity by an enthusiastic crowd anxious to see the man who had written and hosted the most unexpectedly popular series on culture in the history of television: Civilisation: A Personal View.

The subject of the series was the history of Western art; but this didn’t explain the wild enthusiasm. In fact, Clark had unwittingly tapped into grim, often unspoken fears of the time – that the social fabric of civilized life in the West was being torn asunder; that it was being undermined by endless war, random violence, moral decadence, and the ennui that corrodes any society overwhelmed by unprecedented material prosperity and a consumer mentality.

But now, from a tweedy and genial figure — more at home reading in an English country house than squinting into the brilliant limelight of sudden celebrity — came a sudden shaft of hope … Clark had brought Civilisation. 

Now, half a century on, we are embarking on a fascinating journey into the history and nature of Western Civilisation. This 15-week series will provide a guide to Civilisation: A Personal View. It can be used to accompany the DVD version or the episodes available on YouTube, or it can be read by itself as a synopsis of Clark’s great work.

Marxism in the Classroom, Riots in the Streets The production of brainwashed generations of automatons. Clare M. Lopez

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/marxism-classroom-riots-streets-clare-m-lopez/

The explosion of lawless rioting on American streets was only a matter of time. Sixty-two years ago, former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen wrote “The Naked Communist” to warn Americans about how communists planned to destroy our system from within, not by means of sudden revolution as envisioned by Karl Marx, but through a version of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s “cultural Marxism.” With a nod to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), it has been a “long march through the institutions” that has brought us to the brink of catastrophe—and much of it began in our schools.

Chapter 13 of Skousen’s book lists 45 goals of communism in America. Number 17 reads: “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of the teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.” And so they did. While American parents were busy working to sustain their families and achieve a piece of the American dream, their children were at schools with teachers and textbooks that taught them to hate America, the Judeo-Christian foundations of our national identity, and the remarkable individuals who built this country on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and more.

As a result, the brainwashed generations of automatons marching in lockstep out of such schools possess neither critical thinking nor the intellectual ability to appreciate the brilliance and opportunity bequeathed to them by the great philosophers of Western Civilization.

Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism By Christopher Caldwell

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/08/10/ibram-x-kendi-prophet-of-anti-racism/

He says we must fight discrimination with discrimination, and that it’s racist to disagree

It is a measure of how deeply our culture is fragmented that some of the best-read people in the country have never heard of Ibram X. Kendi. Most Wall Street Journal readers would probably have to Google him. But Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers.

Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer after having spent several months on the list last fall and winter. For many of the protesters who poured onto America’s streets in June in the wake of the videotaped killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the book has been a conceptual road map. As the first fires were being lit in Minnesota, Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago. BU will also host the Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded at American University.

The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement. Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

Common Sense About China By Robert Curry

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/21/common-sense-about-china/

A review “Communist China’s War Inside America,” by Brian Kennedy (Encounter, 56

China’s goal, Brian Kennedy writes, is “demoralizing the United States to the point where America believes that further resistance is futile.” They can’t succeed without the help of America’s elite.

Something really strange is going on in America today. If you have wondered why political correctness requires you to avoid using the word “Chinese” with regard to a virus that came from China, then I have the book for you. It’s Communist China’s War Inside America by my friend Brian Kennedy. The good news is that the book—the latest in Encounter Books’ “Broadside” series—is very brief (the main text is only 49 pages). It is also written in a beautiful, clear style. Despite its brevity, it provides all you need to understand the nature of the Chinese threat to America, and to understand what can be done and must be done.

Kennedy gets straight to the point, writing that the Chinese 

are confident that America has grown corrupt, and that its political, financial, and cultural elites are in near-complete sympathy with the globalist project of an interdependent world, with the P.R.C. [the People’s Republic of China] at its head.

And make no mistake: the Chinese have ample evidence that their confidence in America’s elites is not misplaced. 

I have a story from my own life that illustrates Kennedy’s point. Recalling what it was like before the pandemic panic took total control of American life will help to set the stage. Back then, the media, the celebrities, and the politicians had not yet mastered the talking points of the COVID-19 narrative. During one of those early days, a local radio news personality announced with great excitement that she had secured an interview with a prominent epidemiologist from the most prestigious university in our region. After thanking the professor profusely for granting the interview, the reporter asked the obvious question, the one that was on my mind at that time: “What is the difference between this flu and the Spanish flu of 1918?” 

Mary Trump Abusing Psychology to Abuse Her Uncle By Sheldon Roth, MD

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/mary_trump_abusing_psychology_to_abuse_her_uncle.html

Sheldon Roth, M.D., a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is the author of recently published Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump.

Hidden Messages

Before you open this book or turn a page, look at the cover.  What do we see?  A handsome, young Donald Trump, in dashing cadet uniform, during one of the finest periods of his life.  In his five years at New York Military Academy, he reaped undiluted acclaim from faculty and classmates — a model student in behavior and academics, popular with classmates, a star athlete elected to the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame, garnering offers from Major League Baseball.  For a book entitled Too Much and Not Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, what is the meaning of this charming cover?  Is it Simon & Schuster’s unconscious peeking through Mary Trump’s agonized victimization?  Do they know something she is disinclined to acknowledge?

Turning to the book’s pages conjures another challenging image, a lexical one: Tolstoy’s opening line of Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike, unhappy families are unhappy each in their own ways.”  The story of the first proposition is yet to be written, since conflict — unhappiness — is inherent to life.  Some families have more conflict, some less, but it is inescapable.  Any family in COVID-19 lockdown will readily testify to this truism.

A Psychopathology of Everyday Life

Mary Trump turns all Trump family conflict into prima facie psychopathology.  Relying as she does on fantastical speculation for thin formulations about the childhood experience of Fred Sr. and Mary Anne Trump’s complicated family of seven (decades before Mary Trump was born) further muddies her questionable psychological lens.  Equally startling is the biased degree to which she views her deceased father, Fred Jr. — perpetrator of domestic wife abuse leading to divorce, repeated abject employment failures, and an ugly history of debilitating alcoholism that contributed to his early death — as the only “self-made” hero of the family.  Even if one accepted her dubious psychological judgments, which I do not, her objectivity defies credulity.

The Trump Century: How Our President Changed the Course of History Forever : Lou Dobbs

How did Donald Trump almost single-handedly reverse America’s decline?

As the 21st Century began, the world’s only superpower was economically adrift, policing the world at the expense of American lives and trillions of dollars, weighed down by one-sided trade and security agreements with Europe and China ratified in a different era. 

Elites of both political parties battled over who would manage America’s decline from preeminent world power.

In The Trump Century, the indomitable Lou Dobbs explains how Trump has steered the debate every day he has been in politics, greatly expanding what Washington thinks is possible. By 2016, the globalist elites demanded no one speak about limiting illegal immigration or securing our borders. The elites told you communist China would soon be like us, and the PC orthodoxy told you what you could or could not say. You were told America’s Middle Class could never grow again and wages would be stagnant into perpetuity. Trump reversed all of that as radical Democrats and the Deep State conspired to overthrow his Presidency, as the deadly pandemic raged, and orchestrated street protests and violent riots dominated news headlines. 

He has not only made America great again but created a new standard for all future Presidents and likely has set the American agenda for the next hundred years. 

The Trump Century opens a window into Trump’s thinking on the economy, foreign policy, and border security and will energize his allies when they realize the future they’ve shaped.

An American’s Odyssey in Soviet Russia: Will We Heed His Warning? By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/07/an_americans_odyssey_in_soviet_russia_will_we_heed_his_warning.html

After I wrote the article titled “The Soviet Plan for ‘Ideological Subversion’ Describes Our Current Turmoil,” Charles Cole, author of In Russian Wonderland: An American’s Odyssey in Soviet Russia, contacted me.  His memoir recounts his time in 1972 as a Russian-speaking American “guide” in various Soviet cities where the “Research and Development in the USA” exhibit was on display. 

He chronicles the lives of average Soviet citizens at that period and describes how people lived under the tyranny of an omnipotent government.  He is exhorting Americans to perceive the lessons of the failed communist experience.  Like others who have reviewed the book, I was struck by the following anecdote, where an elderly man gave Cole a bag of ten freshly picked apples.  At the bottom of the bag, Cole found a piece of paper folded into a tiny cube. It read,  “We have a totalitarian regime. If we had a democratic republic, we would have progressed further and achieved more.  Nowadays the psychiatric hospitals are filled with dissidents[.]  You should take pride in having such a democratic country and not be overly tolerant in the face of those who have been blinded and deceived by propaganda.”

Also illuminating is the story that Cole recounts of when he and his fellow guides went to dinner.  They were approached by English-speaking black men from Africa.  Cole asked if their country sent a lot of exchange students to Moscow.

‘Oh, yes,’ replied one, ‘we send all of them here to the Soviet Union.’ He explained why: ‘We used to send quite a few of our students to Princeton, Columbia, and Berkeley, but they all came back Marxists. Now we send them here, and after three or four years in the USSR, they all return dedicated anti-communists.’

It’s a lesson that American parents still haven’t learned. They send their kids to Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, and other universities, and they come back as radical leftists, and, yes, some of them flat-out Marxists.