RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself

The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

Thomas Frank is one of America’s more skillful writers, an expert practitioner of a genre one might call historical journalism – ironic, because no recent media figure has been more negatively affected by historical change. Frank became a star during a time of intense curiosity about the reasons behind our worsening culture war, and now publishes a terrific book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, at a time when people are mostly done thinking about what divides us, gearing up to fight instead.

Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.”

Yet Clinton’s chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party’s latest Kennedy wannabe, John Kerry, did worse, and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant, despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?”

Frank, a Midwesterner and one of the last exemplars of a media tradition that saw staying in touch with the thinking of the general population as a virtue, was not puzzled. What’s the Matter with Kansas? was framed as an effort to answer that liberal cocktail-party conundrum – “How could anyone who’s ever worked for someone vote Republican?” was the version Frank described hearing – and the answer, at least on the surface, was appealing to coastal intellectuals.

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. 

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.

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.