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BOOKS

TOM FITTON:A Republic Under Assault: The Left’s Ongoing Attack on American Freedom

In this explosive new book, New York Times bestselling author and president of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton explains how the Radical Left and the Deep State are trying to destroy the Trump presidency.

Tom Fitton’s first two New York Times bestselling books, The Corruption Chronicles and Clean House, exposed the hypocrisy and corruption of Obama’s two terms. Now, in Fitton’s latest investigative probe, he identifies the four major forces posing a continued threat to American democracy.

Deep State Efforts to Destroy the Trump Presidency: How the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign paid for the fraudulent anti-Trump “Steele Dossier,” and how it was used by the Obama FBI and DOJ to dupe the FISA Court to allow it to spy on the Trump presidential campaign AND President Trump. These and more dirty secrets of Obamagate and the impeachment coup attempt are exposed.

Hillary Clinton Email Scandal: How the Clinton team and senior officials at the Obama State Department conspired to cover up Hillary Clinton’s secret email system—and shocking revelations that tie the Obama White House to the cover-up!

Voter Fraud: How Soros-funded groups attack states that seek to protect clean elections by challenging voter ID laws, and how the Left is cynically peddling COVID-19 crisis electoral “reforms,” such as mail-in voting, which could increase voter fraud and election chaos. And shocking numbers about dirty voting rolls across the nation!

Illegal Immigration: How deadly illegal “sanctuary” policies are exploding across America, and how our nation’s sovereignty has been under assault by radical open-border advocates.

Subversive Deep State collaborators with ties to the Clinton and Obama machines not only launched countless—often illegal—operations to stop and then remove Trump, but even more alarmingly, are working to transform the United States into something truly unrecognizable to all who believe in liberty and the rule of law.

Today one of their main targets is President Donald J. Trump.

Tomorrow it could be you and anyone who believes in the US Constitution, believes the United States must have clearly defined and protected borders, believes in the need for a strong military, believes in the value of hard work and faith, and believes in the rule of law and American exceptionalism.

A REVIEW OF DAVID GOLDMAN’S BOOK “YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED: CHINA’S PLAN TO SINO-FORM THE WORLD BY by SCOTT A. SHAY

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/07/10/you-might-not-be-interested-in-china-but-china-is-interested-in-you/

OU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN CHINA, BUT CHINA IS INTERESTED IN YOU

n September of 2019, I was invited to a gathering of Jewish Joe Biden supporters. Rather than ask about Israel, the Iran deal, or frankly anything else Jewish, I asked Biden about China. In a nutshell, my question was: China is currently leading the US in quantum communications, quantum computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, and chip manufacturing. China was just the first country to land a spacecraft on the dark side of the moon. We are no longer a feared military adversary in the South China Sea. The Belt and Road Initiative has the potential to totally redraw the trade patterns that have been so advantageous to the US. And China has yet to be taken to task about its human rights violations. As president, what would be your China policy?

Biden began by saying that President Donald Trump correctly diagnosed that China presents novel issues for the US, but that Trump’s China policies had failed. Then he simply noted his many years of foreign policy experience and his private dinners with China’s leader Xi Jinping. He also spoke extensively about the greatness of US research universities. His answer was underwhelming to say the least.

Unfortunately, as David Goldman argues in his new book You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-form the World, Biden, like previous administration leaders of both parties and Congresses, including Trump, has no cogent China strategy.

Goldman attributes this shocking omission to American overconfidence, a bipartisan failure to understand China’s goals, and a lack of political will to establish a long-term plan to counter them. Further, as Goldman explains, if the US does not act soon, China will dominate the world; even in Israel, the Chinese are primary investors in key sectors like rail and ports. The US will not only be unable to stand up to China, but it too will be under its thumb.

‘Airborne’ By Matt Margolis Is the Definitive Guide to the Media’s COVID-19 Malfeasance and Malpractice By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/07/11/airborne-by-matt-margolis-is-the-definitive-guide-to-the-medias-covid-19-malfeasance-and-malpractice-n626922

The COVID-19 pandemic has given the corporate media an unparalleled opportunity to show Americans that they are little more than partisan activists. The daily Coronavirus Task Force briefings were a stunning display of the media’s childish and partisan behavior. They appeared neither serious nor smart, and American’s trust in the press continued to tumble. In Airborne, author Matt Margolis details some of their most egregious distortions, misfires, and outright lies during the pandemic.

As the election nears, it is a near certainty that the media will resurface the pandemic response to try and damage President Trump. As noted in the book’s introduction, the COVID-19 response will be weaponized this cycle in the same way Hurricane Katrina was weaponized against George W. Bush. In both cases, the response was robust and appropriate. Yet the corporate media will spin a narrative not remotely related to the reality of the situation.

In Airborne, Margolis gives the president’s supporters a complete guide to combatting COVID-19 lies. The news cycle moves so quickly that the full list of dirty deeds by the corporate talking heads is challenging to recall. Many highlighted in the book are astonishing in their boldness.

The Prophetic Pessimism of Michel Houellebecq Anthony Daniels

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/the-prophetic-pessimism-of-michel-houellebecq/

Asked what the post-COVID world would be like, the most famous of contemporary French writers, Michel Houellebecq (above), replied with his customary asperity, “The same—only worse.”

This is because, according to him, if I have read him aright, deterioration in our modern world never misses an opportunity to take place. Man does not learn from experience or from anything else, for that matter; and because time’s arrow flies in one direction only, we cannot reconstitute or restore our civilisation once we have smashed it up. In short, we are doomed.

Strangely enough, this superficially depressing view, that everything is terrible and getting constantly worse, is in a way consolatory, which is perhaps why Houellebecq is so wildly popular (his last book, Sérotonine, had an initial print-run of 330,000 in France alone). If we are doomed whatever we do, we are absolved of responsibility for our own doom. Moreover, by the time we have finished reading his enumeration and examination of the vacuity of existence in consumer society, we feel much the better for it. At least we are not as bad as that, and we have had a good laugh en route to the dismal conclusion.

Houellebecq is a gifted and brilliant, but also somewhat limited, writer who has gross lapses of taste. His brilliance can be appreciated by consideration of the titles of his last two books alone: Soumission (submission) and Sérotonine (serotonin).

Submission is, of course, what Islam means, but in the book it is France that submits to submission, not because of the intellectual strength of Islam (no one could have been more contemptuous of Islam’s claims to intellectual value than Houellebecq, who famously said of the Koran that it was a wretched, a truly wretched, book), but because of the nihilistic lack of faith of the French population in anything spiritually transcendent: especially in the intelligentsia and upper echelons who, after all, decisively set the tone for the whole of society. And what is true of France, of course, is true of the West in general.

Julie Kelly’s NeverTrump Exposé ‘Disloyal Opposition’ Hits Store Shelves Today By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/07/julie-kellys-nevertrump-expose-disloyal-opposition-hits-store-shelves-today/

Like no one else in conservative media, American Greatness author Julie Kelly has gleefully needled, mocked, and embarrassed the obnoxious NeverTrump movement in numerous articles and posts on Twitter. Most importantly, she has strived to expose them as the shameless and soulless grifters they are.

Her new book, Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President, hits store shelves today, taking her one woman crusade against these “petty, vengeful, bombastic, reactionary, and abusive” fake conservatives to new heights.

Purifying Publishing The cultural commissars come for conservative books. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/purifying-publishing-bruce-bawer/

Of America’s most powerful and prominent cultural institutions, it’s quick work naming those that aren’t entirely left-wing satrapies. TV? Fox News, although things are looking less and less encouraging there. Colleges? Hillsdale, I guess, though how many Ivy League faculty members would ever admit to having heard of it? Newspapers? The New York Post (sometimes), Wall Street Journal (kind of), and perhaps one or two others from sea to shining sea. Silicon Valley? Nothing. Hollywood? ¡Nada! Big business? Hmm: what is there, nowadays, honestly, other than that My Pillow guy?

One field in which there’s at least a soupçon of ideological diversity is the book trade. Yes, staffers at the major publishing houses are overwhelmingly on the left. Ditto bookstore employees. Plus the people who give out the major book awards. Not to mention that the heftiest advances for political books go to Democrats. Since the turn of the century, the biggest nonfiction book deal, amounting to at least $65 million, was for Michelle Obama’s Becoming (2018) and for an as-yet-unpublished opus by Barack; second – raking in $15 million – was Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004); third – at $14 million – was Hillary’s Hard Choices (2014).

One more thing about the reflexive leftism of the book scene. Thanks to today’s lethal cancel culture, even classics are at risk. Recently, in an article for the School Library Journal headlined “Little House, Big Problem: What To Do with ‘Classic’ Books That Are Also Racist,” Marva Hinton identified both Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as racist. No, she didn’t just say that they contained racist language, which would have been fair enough; she asserted that these two books – both of them key texts in the history of the American struggle against racism – are in fact racist.

Nuclear Policy: Whatever Happened to Common Sense? by Peter Huessy

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16180/nuclear-policy-common-sense

William Perry’s proposals, in his new book, The Button, (1) ignore the current Russian and Chinese nuclear threats, (2) widely exaggerate the costs of US nuclear modernization and (3) would actually so upset the nuclear balance as to make a nuclear attack on the US more likely.

For some strange reason, Perry does not ask for cuts from Russia or China, perhaps heralding a new faith-based arms control strategy? Both countries are completing massive nuclear modernization build-ups. Putin’s defense minister announced Russia’s nuclear modernization would be nearly 90% complete by the end of 2020, while China is on pace to double its nuclear forces by 2030.

At its peak, then, the complete nuclear enterprise would amount to 6-7% of the defense budget to modernize, operate and maintain, while modernization alone would be 3%. This still is some one-third of what it was at the height of the Cold War, when the US economy was far smaller and the defense budget a fraction of what it is today.

As soon as the US eliminates its ICBM force, Russia and China will get back in the business of seeking to disarm the United States, one top admiral reminded Gatestone.

In the new defense bill, the administration and Congress are building better missile defenses, including space-based sensors, and advanced national and regional systems. Combined with the newly initiated discussions in Geneva with the Russians on arms control measures, the US is on the right path.

Dr. William Perry is considered one of the fathers of stealth aircraft; he started directing research on the B2 program when a senior official in the DOD back in the 1970s.

He later became secretary of defense from 1994-1997 during the Clinton administration and was often seen in Ukraine at photo-ops where Soviet-era ICBM silos were eliminated, both between Russia and the USA, as part of the 1992 Nunn-Lugar and 1991 Start treaty.

Perry has a new book, The Button, about US nuclear policy and his support for global nuclear disarmament. He makes numerous proposals that he claims will lessen nuclear dangers and bring us closer to global zero, the end state when presumably all nuclear weapons have been destroyed.

The Believer The ideology behind the lust to tear America down. Jamie Glazov

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/believer-jamie-glazov/

Editors’ note: As we witness the Marxist revolution currently transpiring right before our eyes in America, a vital question confronts us: what yearnings lie inside the members of groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa — and why do members of the Democrat Party and of the Establishment Media cheer them on? What inspires this violent hatred of America and the ferocious craving to tear it down? These are, without doubt, some of the most pertinent questions of our time. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it vital to run, below, an excerpt from Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror. The excerpt is the second chapter, titled ‘The Believer’s Diagnosis’; it explores the progressive believer’s secular faith – and unveils his heart of darkness. Don’t miss this essay. 

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The Believer’s Diagnosis
“Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
—Karl Marx, invoking a dictum of Goethe’s devil in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoléon

In the eyes of Joseph E. Davies, who served for several years as American ambassador to the Soviet Union before the Second World War, no human being merited greater respect than Joseph Stalin. The ambassador spent much time reflecting on why he believed the Soviet dictator deserved the world’s—and his own people’s—heartfelt veneration. He finally realized that the answer had always been staring him square in the face: it was that Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”[i] Leading French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre discovered a similar truth about his own secular deity, Fidel Castro. “Castro,” he noted, “is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle, and the earth. He is the whole island.”[2] Father Daniel Berrigan, meanwhile,  contended that Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong was an individual “in whom complexity dwells, in whom daily issues of life and death resound; a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion . . . he had dared to be a humanist in an inhuman time.”[3]

The objects of all this adoration, of course, were despotic mass murderers. One crucial question, therefore, surfaces: what exactly inspires a person, and an entire mass movement, to deify a monstrous tyrant as a father-god who transcends the singular and encompasses, as Sartre put it, all the people and their land? The answer to this question helps illuminate the contemporary Left’s romance with Islamist jihadists, just as it helps crystallize the Left’s alliance with the most vicious totalitarians of the twentieth century.

Thomas Sowell at 90 Is More Relevant Than Ever By Steve H. Hanke & Richard M. Ebeling

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/thomas-sowell-90-indispensable-voice-more-relevant-than-ever/

An indispensable voice over the decades speaks to our present moment.

Y esterday, Thomas Sowell turned 90. And he is more relevant than ever. Sowell, a frequent contributor to National Review and prodigious scholar, has delivered yet another insightful and accessible book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. It was released on his birthday — a gift from Sowell to the rest of us.

In his new book, Sowell puts primary sources and facts under the powerful microscope of his analysis. His findings are, as is often the case, inconvenient, not to say explosive, truths. Indeed, Charter Schools and Their Enemies documents how non-white students thrive in charter schools and close the performance gap with their white peers. It’s no surprise, then, that there are long waiting lists to enter charter schools. So why aren’t there more of them? Well, public schools and their teachers’ unions don’t like the competition. This, of course, traps non-white students in inferior public schools.

Just who is Thomas Sowell and why is he a larger-than-life figure in today’s world? Sowell was born on June 30, 1930, in North Carolina. He grew up in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood and served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. He earned three economics degrees, one from Harvard (1958), one from Columbia (1959), and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1968). After holding down faculty positions at prestigious universities, Sowell settled at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he has been for the past 40 years.

As Sowell recounts in his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey (2000), he considered himself a Marxist during most of his student years. Chicago put an end to that infatuation. But Sowell’s study of classical economists included the works of Marx, and in 1985 he published Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. As anyone steeped in Marx knows, all symbols of the capitalist, exploitive past must be uprooted and destroyed before a workers’ paradise can be constructed. It turns out that Marxism is of the moment: Yes, the removal of statues and the changing of street and building names is straight out of Marx’s playbook.

H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America By virtue of the unsettling, bracing originality of his ideas, Mencken is rendered as inaccessible to the American reader today as an alien from deep space. By Ilana Mercer

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/29/h-l-mencken-misfit-in-21st-century-america/

H.L. Mencken, a contrarian polemicist and the consummate critic, who wrote prolifically and prodigiously from 1899 until 1948, may no longer seem relevant, but the fault would not be his.

Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to immutable truth. He was also a brilliant satirist and a writer whose facility with the English idiom and grasp of intellectual history remain unsurpassed.  

How can a phenom like Mencken appeal in our age, The Age of the Idiot? 

He can’t. He should, but he can’t.

Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour “dunderheads” America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.

How could Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and “editors” excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth?   

Not for nothing did one wag say that the history of ideas is the history of words. And since Mencken was, first and foremost, a man of ideas (and hence, words)—no discussion of Mencken and his ideas is complete without a reference to English, the language he deployed with such verve and vim. 

Thus, when “a few newspaper smarties protested” Mencken’s verbal virtuosity, Mencken tartly noted, in his Preface to A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949): “Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives . . . are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses. Let them . . . leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.” 

Written at a considerable level of abstraction, for a prosaic people that, by Mencken’s estimation, “cannot grasp an abstraction,” a Mencken essay is certain to furrow the brow of the above-average American reader, writer, and editor these days. Unlike the tracts disgorged by Conservatism, Inc., the least complicated of Mencken’s editorial writings would place excessive demands on the unsupple minds of young activists, who are busy striking a selfie on social media or running to CPUKE conferences.