RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/25/the-grubby-corruption-of-our-power-elite/

We all owe Peter Schweizer an enormous debt of gratitude for his enormous and effective labors in bringing sunlight to these tenebrous and mephitic climes.

In January 1956, John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, biographical encomia to eight U.S. senators, from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft, whom Kennedy thought exhibited conspicuous courage in the discharge of their public duties.

I say Kennedy published Profiles in Courage. But the book was written not by JFK but by the loyal Kennedy apparatchik and fixer Ted Sorensen. Sorenson, like so many in the Kennedy circle, was a bit thuggish. He was also an eloquent writer. Remember this famous bit from Kennedy’s inaugural? “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Nicely put, and it was put by Sorensen, merely read by Kennedy.

Anyway, Profiles in Courage was an early installment in that long-running (indeed, still-running) effort to obscure the distasteful reality of JFK with a carefully cultivated image of an eager yet culturally sophisticated patriot (see the index under “Pablo Casals visits the White House”).

Profiles in Courage deserves its place in that vast mythopoeic enterprise the public knows as Camelot. But a much more important book is Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elites.

Schweizer will be known to many readers of American Greatness. He is unquestionably our most accomplished anatomist of “using public power for personal gain. . . . cronyism, corruption, patronage, and intimidation.” His string of bestsellers includes Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, and Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/just-another-gangster-lloyd-billingsley/
Just Another Gangster Black Panther “Field Marshal” Don Cox explains it all for you.

EXCERPT:

“The Missouri-born Cox had been a member of the National Rifle Association and Bobby Seale appointed him “Field Marshal,” meaning,  “whenever you see something that needs to be done, do it.” Cox mentions shooting a cop whose crime was to be white. He was not the first nor the last law enforcement officer to be the victim of Panther violence.

Cox mentions Martin Luther King, but fails to note that Panthers mocked him as “de Lawd” and an uncle Tom. Angela Davis pops up a few times, with no mention of her Lenin Peace Prize or candidacy for vice president with the Communist Party in 1980 and 1984.

Stokely Carmichael, “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party condemned all whites and working coalitions with them, “which was utterly contrary to the direction Eldridge [Cleaver] had been taking the party.” As Cox explains, the Panthers were in a bitter fight with “bald headed” Ron Karenga’s US organization and its “pork-chop cultural nationalism.”  In January 1969 on the UCLA campus, Karenga’s group gunned down Panthers Bunchy Carter and John Huggins. At the funeral, Cox recalls, “niggers with bald heads were looking to shoot at anything in a black leather jacket, and niggers in black leather jackets were looking to shoot at anything with a bald head.”

The left has excused the criminal mayhem committed by Panthers like Cox as the result of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, but as Cox explains nothing could be further from the truth. Blaming COINTELPRO, he writes, “is a very convenient way of avoiding analysis.” It was not a “repression by law enforcement agencies that destroyed the Black Panther Party.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/yes-i-con-mark-tapson/

Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who rose to president of an NAACP chapter by pretending to be black. Jussie Smollett, the black actor who blamed a fake hate crime on MAGA hat-wearing white rednecks. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who parlayed a false claim of Native American heritage into acceptance at Harvard Law School.  These are just a few of the most controversial recent examples of Democrats attempting to dupe the public in order to further their careers and/or their radical agendas.

That’s the theme of the new book Yes I Con: United Fakes of America by FrontPage Mag contributor Lloyd Billingsley, author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, Bill of Writes: Dispatches from the Political Correctness Battlefield, and more. In Yes I Con, Billingsley presents several exhibits of evidence of the left’s habitual fraudulence and self-deception, including Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Barack Hussein Obama, Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and stolen valor perpetrator Sen. Richard Blumenthal, purported gay rights icon Harvey Milk and the aforementioned Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren, and more. He also indicts the left-leaning media’s complicity in covering up or turning a blind eye to these duplicities.

I asked Billingsley some questions about his new short book for FrontPage Mag.

Mark Tapson: Lloyd, you open with a quote from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire about the conscience going silent in the “middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.” Do you think the leftist deception you recount in the book stems more from self-delusion, outright fraud, or a combination? In other words, have leftists simply normalized and justified their deceit in their own minds?

Lloyd Billingsley: It’s a combination and a process. Self-delusion can remain a personal problem until the person deploys it to deceive others. That requires the deluded party to silence the conscience in the progression to outright fraud. For example, no harm if Elizabeth Warren fancies herself a Cherokee, but it takes some doing to make that claim the basis of a career, more so to maintain it after the fraud has been exposed beyond any doubt. That’s what Gibbon was on about.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/biden_was_enriching_family_members_other_than_hunter.html

On January 21, Peter Schweizer’s newest book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, will be released. It should sell well given that pre-sales have already put it at #14 on the Amazon charts. As a preview of coming attractions, the New York Post published an extract from the book detailing “How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.”

According to Schwiezer, Biden was fibbing when he announced last year, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.” The truth is that Biden’s business conversations not only benefited Hunter, they also benefitted Biden’s son-in-law Howard, his brothers James and Frank, and his sister Valerie. Loose lips enrich sibs.

James Biden was a welcome friend in the Obama White House. “Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.” For example, just three weeks after Biden’s longtime friend Kevin Justice, president of HillStone International, a subsidiary of a huge construction management firm, visited the White House, HillStone announced that James Biden was its new Executive Vice President.

No one cared that Biden had no experience in construction management. What might have mattered was that, six months later, the firm got a contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq, plus a $22 million U.S. federal government contract to manage a State Department project. An executive in the parent company later told investors it helped to have the vice president’s brother as a partner. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/amity_shlaes_verdict_on_the_great_society_not_that_great.html

Seldom in history has a program been undertaken with such lofty intentions and ended in such bitter disappointment as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” In her latest book Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes provides a fresh appraisal of the idealistic policies that came to define the 1960s and a historical narrative that is especially timely now.

Shlaes’ book is a follow-up to The Forgotten Man, her excellent history of the Great Depression. This book is an apt sequel, since the Great Society was promoted as the completion of the “unfinished business” of the New Deal. However, there was a significant difference between the two programs. The New Deal originated in response to a severe economic crisis. In contrast, the Great Society was enacted at a time of economic prosperity, when poverty rates were dropping.

Indeed, as Shlaes makes clear, it was the very prosperity and confidence of the postwar years that made the Great Society possible. “Compared to overcoming a Great Depression or conquering Europe and Japan,” Shlaes writes, “eliminating poverty or racial discrimination had to be easy. American society was already so good…This good society had to become, in the words of President Johnson, a Great Society.”

Shlaes begins the book by discussing Bonanza, a TV western that premiered on January 2, 1960. It was an entirely new kind of Western, as Shlaes describes:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/book-review-reclaiming-common-sense-pushes-back-against-intellectual-cultural-elites/

Our intellectual and cultural elites have become unmoored from common sense; a new book charts a course for restoring it.

Robert Curry’s Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World is a companion volume to his earlier Common Sense Nation. Both books are apologias, defenses against certain attacks by our intellectual and cultural elites on the foundations of American life, which the American Founders understood in terms of “common sense.” As Curry elaborates, “While Common Sense Nation addresses the challenge to the American founding by presenting anew the Founders’ understanding of what they were establishing”—an understanding rooted in Scottish “common sense realism”—“Reclaiming Common Sense takes up . . . the challenge to the foundation of the founding”—commonsense rationality itself. Ultimately, he wants to “restore a trust in common sense and an understanding of its crucial role in our lives” as human beings and as American citizens.

A good catch-all term for the elites’ alternative to common sense is “political correctness,” an ideological party line much akin to the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984 that tries to prohibit not only honest questions but even acknowledgement of facts in plain view. Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! From denying basic biology in favor of infinitely fluid “gender identity” to condemning commonsense measures against Islamic terrorism as “Islamophobia,” there is no fact so obvious it won’t be discounted whenever it should cross or inhibit whatever agenda du jour elites deem “progressive.” Political correctness is, in short, a “war on common sense.”

But what exactly is common sense? It turns out to be much harder to describe and explain common sense than just to have it. Describing and explaining it, however, becomes necessary when what would be taken for granted in a healthy social situation comes under relentless assault by deconstructionist, fundamentally nihilistic “intellectuals” and ideologues (not to be confused with philosophers) who because of their pedigrees and because of their fearsome passion may intimidate and undermine the confidence of people not prepared to handle the onslaught. In such a context, which we face today, we need a few insightful, bold, and eloquent people to step into the breach and put up a reasoned defense—people like Robert Curry.

Our intellectual and cultural elites have become unmoored from common sense; a new book charts a course for restoring it.

Robert Curry’s Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World is a companion volume to his earlier Common Sense Nation. Both books are apologias, defenses against certain attacks by our intellectual and cultural elites on the foundations of American life, which the American Founders understood in terms of “common sense.” As Curry elaborates, “While Common Sense Nation addresses the challenge to the American founding by presenting anew the Founders’ understanding of what they were establishing”—an understanding rooted in Scottish “common sense realism”—“Reclaiming Common Sense takes up . . . the challenge to the foundation of the founding”—commonsense rationality itself. Ultimately, he wants to “restore a trust in common sense and an understanding of its crucial role in our lives” as human beings and as American citizens.

A good catch-all term for the elites’ alternative to common sense is “political correctness,” an ideological party line much akin to the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984 that tries to prohibit not only honest questions but even acknowledgement of facts in plain view. Who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? And pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! From denying basic biology in favor of infinitely fluid “gender identity” to condemning commonsense measures against Islamic terrorism as “Islamophobia,” there is no fact so obvious it won’t be discounted whenever it should cross or inhibit whatever agenda du jour elites deem “progressive.” Political correctness is, in short, a “war on common sense.”