RUTHFULLY YOURS

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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.”

In this interview with The New American’s Alex Newman, author and political analyst Linda Goudsmit outlines some of the pseudo-humanitarian hoaxes that have been used by world-government advocates to undermine American freedom on the road to a New World Order.

https://youtu.be/OpyvCOjlwLk

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/man-full-bruce-bawer/

I guess I became aware of Dan Crenshaw, the freshman congressman from Texas, when most other Americans did. Three days before the 2018 election, Saturday Night Live aired a “Weekend Update” segment on which cast member Pete Davidson mocked a few House candidates. Among them was Crenshaw, whom Davidson described as looking “like a hitman in a porno” – the purported joke being that Crenshaw wears an eyepatch. Davidson tagged his jest by saying: “I’m sorry, I know he lost his eye in a war…or whatever.” 

Indeed, Crenshaw was a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, where, on June 15, 2012, a Taliban bomb severely damaged both of his eyes. Although doctors expected him to be totally blind, surgeons at Walter Reed managed – miraculously – to save his left eye.

Davidson’s tin-eared dig at Crenshaw made headlines around the world – that’s why I heard about it (I haven’t watched SNL in years) – and sparked outrage. There were calls for him to be fired. But Crenshaw didn’t join in the pile-on. Instead, on the following Saturday, after he’d won his election, Crenshaw appeared on SNL, graciously accepted an apology from Davidson, and read a few gags at Davidson’s expense.

That display of class and good humor was impressive. During the year and a half since, Crenshaw has become a familiar face on cable news, and he’s been consistently impressive there, too – articulate, unflappable, and very, very smart. Hence I expected Crenshaw’s new book, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage to be a worthwhile read.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/06/01/signatures-a-nourishing-intellectual-feast/

Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime, by David Pryce-Jones (Encounter, 266 pp., $28.99)

There is a genre of book that constitutes the happiest — rather than guiltiest — pleasure for book-lovers: books about books. Books that seem to tap into the echt, the origin-pleasure of reading. Books that exemplify why reading remains the supreme vehicle for the transmission not just of facts or of history, but of memory.

Take an author who possesses the skill for capturing this essence and combines it with the spirit of a gentleman, the taste of a connoisseur, the eye of a gossip, and the knowledge of a historian, and you get near to what I think might be the perfect genre of book. “Belles lettres” may once have almost done justice to it, but, thanks to the sniffily pejorative ring of the term, I’m not sure it now does. Still, however you describe it, there remains a type of book that some of us dive for on the table as soon as we see it.

Whatever name you give this genre, David Pryce-Jones’s Signatures is a masterpiece in it. The premise is brilliantly simple. The author, a familiar presence to NR readers, selects 90 books from his considerable library, each signed by its author. Each book, of the many collected over the course of a long life, is awarded its own brief chapter, allowing Pryce-Jones to open his treasure chest of a memory, recall the circumstances in which he met or came to know the book’s author, and reflect on the author’s world and the impact this extraordinary cast had on their century.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2020/05/05/the-post-email-interviews-humanitarian-hoax-author-linda-goudsmit/

“WHO BENEFITS?” by Sharon Rondeau
Last week, The Post & Email had the pleasure of interviewing Linda Goudsmit, the author of a sizable series published on her blog over nearly three years.  Recently Goudsmit compiled all 50 articles into a book titled, The Book of Humanitarian Hoaxes:  Killing America with ‘Kindness’.

Goudsmit told us that her series arose from her conclusion that there is “a monstrous power-grab” aimed at consolidating authority under the United Nations to enable “one-world government.”

Contemplating her launch of the articles, which total 50, Goudsmit told us, “To me, it’s so interesting.  I’m 72 years old; I never, ever dreamed that in my retirement, I would become a political analyst.  I was an English major in college, and reading and analyzing books was my life.  I have four children, the oldest born in 1973 and the youngest in 1979, the year President Carter established the U.S. Department of Education.  I noticed the change in education when my youngest child was in elementary school in the 80s.  It was called ‘cooperative learning.’  Instead of individual learning, students learned in groups and the schools started introducing pro-collectivist materials into the educational curriculum.”

Fast-forward to today, Goudsmit observed, “It’s frightening.  Now we’re in the third generation of students indoctrinated toward collectivism and one-world government. I didn’t understand then what I was looking at, but what I understood was that when I was young, there were social pressures.  At that time, you grew up; you became a solid citizen, you pledged allegiance to the United States of America. People had differences of opinion but we loved the country; we were taught to love the country.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/coronavirus-camus-and-communism-lloyd-billingsley/

The current pandemic is turning up references to Albert Camus, gone since 1960 but still with plenty to say about the modern world. His 1947 novel The Plague, for example, is highly relevant at the present moment. 

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we refuse to believe in ones that come crashing down out of a clear blue sky,” and in Oran, in French Algeria, they were unprepared for the surging epidemic that started with dead rats. As Camus notes, “how should they have given a thought to anything like the plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views?”

The residents of Oran had “lost the golden spell of happier summers. Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure,” and imposed “a complete break with all that life had meant to them.” With the city locked down, and guarded by sentries, the epidemic “spelled the ruin of the tourist trade,” and people had become wary of each other.

“It’s common knowledge you can’t trust your neighbor,” observes Jean Tarrou, “he may pass the disease to you without your knowing it.” As the plague spread, “there was suspicion in the eyes of all,” with people “puzzled over their problem and afraid.” The cautious Cottard sees “a possible police spy in everybody.”  The journalist Raymond Rambert plots to escape but changes his mind.

When Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with dismay that it was interpreting a very different Constitution from the one the framers had written – the one that had established a federal government manned by the people’s own elected representatives, charged with protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their families, communities, and states.   

Thomas, had deep misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in segregated Savannah, flirting with and rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of the universe better than the people themselves, or that the rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than worse. So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a quarter century on the Court, he has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the trail he blazed.

Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency
by Jack Cashill | Aug 18, 2020