RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/06/18/knives_out_bolton_lacerates_nikki_haley_in_new_book__143483.html

As far as exit interviews are concerned, this one was unofficial and especially ugly.

In his forthcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened,” John Bolton condemns President Trump as a bumbling executive and mocks Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a political opportunist and dismisses Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as generally averse to conflict.

But he doesn’t stop there, as one rising GOP star is finding out.

The highly unflattering 494-page tome, cataloguing the former national security adviser’s time in the Trump White House, seems destined for bestseller lists — that is, if it can get published. Citing national security concerns late Wednesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to issue a restraining order.

But copies are already floating around Capitol Hill, and regardless of what the court rules, a harsh picture of Nikki Haley is among the portraits emerging. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during much of Bolton’s tenure acted like a “free electron” more concerned with political ambition than international diplomacy, according to a copy of the book obtained by RealClearPolitics.

Haley, the rare Cabinet member to leave the White House on good terms with the president, is considered a top presidential aspirant in a post-Trump Republican Party. Bolton seems intent on denting that reputation.

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad unleashed a chemical attack on his own people, Bolton suggested that Haley stand with ambassadors from the United Kingdom and France in the U.N. Security Council to present a united front against the rogue leader.

“I had done that many times,” Bolton wrote, “but Haley declined, preferring to have pictures of her alone giving the U.S. statement in the Council. That told me something.” It was indicative, he added, of an “untethered performance in New York over the past year-plus,” and Bolton, still new in his job at the time, made a note to discuss the performance with Pompeo.

https://mailchi.mp/peaceandtolerance/apt-webinar-our-new-book-on-radical-islam-in-new-england?e=c4e6370125

How the Muslim Brotherhood obtained a foothold in Boston through an organization called the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB).

• How the ISB built the largest mosque in the Northeast to radicalize Boston’s Muslims.

• How the ISB’s radical leadership defrauded the political and civic leaders of Boston, who accepted the mosque as an authentically moderate Muslim force for good.

• How Jewish leaders, knowing about the antisemitism of the ISB mosque leaders, decided nevertheless to give the mosque a kosher stamp, giving political cover to the rest of Boston’s civic and political leadership to embrace the mosque.

• What mosque leaders are preaching to Boston Muslims now, in 2020.

Ilya and Charles will name names of those Jewish leaders who refuse to tell Boston’s Jews, or anyone else, what they know about the radicals who own and run the mosque. They will show the primary source videos and documents described in Ilya’s book, which expose the extent to which Boston’s leaders have ignored and aided Islamist extremist efforts in the city.

This willful ignorance has cost the city significantly: Fourteen leaders, donors, and congregants of the Islamic Society of Boston — including the Boston Marathon bombers — are either in prison, awaiting trial, on the run, or dead due to their involvement in Islamic terrorism.

Ilya based his book on thousands of documents obtained from years of on-the-ground monitoring of the ISB’s activities, from the ISB’s internal financial and governance records subpoenaed during its defamation lawsuit against its critics, and from moderate Boston Muslims who have been fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts in Boston even longer than we have.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/hillary-without-bill-bruce-bawer/

In his 1976 novel The Alteration, Kingsley Amis imagined a contemporary Britain in which the Protestant Reformation never took place. In The Plot against America (2004), Philip Roth imagined a 1940s America in which Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 election and signs peace treaties with Germany and Japan. In her new novel, Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld imagines an equally portentous alternate world: one in which Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton – and ended up being elected president in 2016.

Well, it’s not quite correct to say that Sittenfeld imagines it. There’s not really much in the way of imagination in this stunningly vapid, pedestrian piece of work, which plods from incident to incident without a single vivid detail or snappy exchange of dialogue or hint of wit. It’s so flatfooted, so thoroughly uninspired, that one assumes, in the early pages, that Sittenfeld – who is a woman – banged it out prontissimo, Joyce Carol Oates-style, with the cynical objective of cashing in on all the poor hapless women who were so devastated by Hillary’s loss that they’d presumably be desperate to escape into an alternate universe in which Hillary won. But as one reads on, one acquires the distinct, and horrifying, impression that Sittenfeld’s heart is actually in this leaden, lifeless thing, and that escaping into her own sketchily depicted parallel universe is Sittenfeld’s way of consoling herself.  

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/a_first_look_at_erasing_america.html

“Progressives” throughout the West seem eager to erase our history and impugn our civilization, with ample blowback from those beastly “deplorables.” You know, those horrid patriotic people who hang out at Dunkin Donuts and live on farms or in small towns, or who serve(d) in the military, or who are blue collar. Thankfully, James S. Robbins, Ph.D, formerly a professor, journalist, and special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, now a senior fellow at the American Foreign Council, has effectively researched this phenomenon from an American perspective. His recent book, Erasing America: Losing our Future by Destroying Our Past (2018), is clear, well written and well researched, without getting bogged down in esoteric jargon. Nor is much spared as the falsehoods of sacred cows are exposed. 

Robbins reminds us that America’s first and third presidents, both southerners, are impugned as slave owners, which we know is evil, thanks in no small measure to the history we have been taught. There have been demands to remove their statues as well as their names from schools, government buildings, streets, etc. But should this be the sole basis for judging George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? Slavery was commonplace in their era, especially in the South, and it is not fair to completely judge those of a bygone era by contemporary standards (here’s looking at you, Halifax). Fairness demands a balanced portrayal, not just a negative one, which means the greatness of Washington and Jefferson must also be acknowledged. Besides, these America and western civilization hating “progressives” might want to grudgingly concede that  Great Britain and her Commonwealth were first to abolish slavery, a worldwide blight hardly unique to the English speaking world. And while the United States followed suit a few decades later, it was still long before many anti-Christian, non-Christian, or non-western societies; the ones romanticized by the politically correct postmodernist left.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/22/the-need-to-discuss-black-on-black-crime/?utm_

In defense of a term

Thomas Abt’s book Bleeding Out (2019) has garnered a fair amount of attention for its proposals to deal with gun violence in mainly black urban neighborhoods. The entire focus of the book is on interventions in high-crime locations to stem the violence, including: hot-spots policing, working with young males at high risk of engaging in violence by offering carrots (“we’re here to help you”) and sticks (“we’ll stop you if you don’t let us help”), and locking up known violent offenders.

Lest you think this book is not about black crime, Abt states quite explicitly that “race matters when it comes to urban violence.” He points out that homicide-victimization rates for black men were 3.9 times the national average and that 52 percent of all known homicide victims were black (2017 data). He might have added that the perpetrators of these crimes were overwhelmingly African Americans. In 2018, where the homicide victim was black, the suspected killer also was 88 percent of the time. And this is not an exceptional situation. From 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by other African Americans. In fact, as I will demonstrate, high rates of black-on-black killing have been the norm for well over a century. But this is not an issue Abt wants to address.

To the contrary, Abt abjures the phrase “black on black.” He calls it “deeply misleading” and says it “perpetuates deeply harmful stereotypes about African Americans.” So Abt has written an entire book addressing the problem, but he and everyone else must refrain from calling it what it is: a black-on-black phenomenon. Why?

Abt offers three reasons. First, violent crime is commonly intraracial, i.e., whites kill whites, Hispanics kill Hispanics, and so on. But, Abt says, we don’t talk about white-on-white violence. Well, that’s simply not true. Many analysts, myself included, discuss white violence, especially where it had a major impact on crime in the United States. This was the case with southern whites especially from the 18th through the 20th centuries, a situation studied extensively by crime historians and criminologists.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/blitz-trump-will-smash-left-and-win-j-christian-adams/

When David Horowitz wrote his latest book Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (Humanix, 2020) he didn’t know that ANTIFA-fueled mobs would be burning and looting cities across America, and even threatening the White House itself.  Then again, knowing how Horowitz understands the Left as well as anyone else in the conservative movement, perhaps he actually did anticipate the events of the last few days.

Blitz is the go-to recap of the first Trump term, from the first days of the so-called “Muslim ban” through a deconstruction of the “partisan impeachment,” as Horowitz labels it.

Blitz is a comprehensive reset at the end of the first Trump term. It is catalog of how we got here and how the Left have lost their minds over President Trump’s new way. Horowitz diagnoses the causes and effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  He also documents how Trump has thrived despite the unhinged hatred aimed at him.

One reason Blitz suggests Trump is unlike his Republican predecessors, is that he didn’t let personal attacks change his tactics.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

When reading about early American history, one is struck by the contrast between the fierce independence, intellect and common sense of those who migrated across the Atlantic to these, then, unknown shores, and the fearful, unquestioning subservience of their descendants. Can a people in a country whose culture has so changed provide the same opportunities for their descendants as our ancestors did for us?

This short book (246 pages), includes a seventeen-page introduction, forty-one-page epilogue and appendix, and five chapters. It is a chronology of Professor Bailyn’s academic life, from his thesis on Tristram Shandy at Williams College in 1943 to a seminar at Harvard, “Justice: Europe in America, 1500-1830,” in 2010. History interested him, he tells us, as he wanted to explore the “connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.” “I discovered…within the plentiful data, [that] one or more obscure documents or individuals…illuminated the greater picture.” Bailyn’s specialty is the American Revolution and events leading to it: “the pivot on which the whole of American history and much of Western civilization turned.”

In the first chapter, “Keayne’s Will,” he explores colonial Boston. He takes the reader through the Will of Robert Keayne (1595-1656), in which Keayne reconciles his success as a Boston immigrant merchant with his belief in a harsh Puritan God. The Will was written over several years and provides clues to the man and the time. As Bailyn writes, “…he made clear the high tension that had always existed between his success in his ‘calling’ and the constraints on the spirit that had inspired it.”