RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/rand-pauls-case-against-socialism/

The Case against Socialism, by Rand Paul (Broadside Books, 368 pp., $28.99)

Just three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialist political activism has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation. Survey data show the label’s growing popularity among college students, while Karl Marx holds the title of the most frequently assigned author from the philosophical canon in American university classrooms. Far from bearing the stigma one might reasonably expect to accompany a movement that killed 100 million people in the 20th century, socialist ideology retains a position of high esteem in elite academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles.

One recurring source of the problem is the intentional cultivation of a definitional fluidity that operates at the convenience of socialism’s adherents. Modern politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez euphemize the term by prefixing it with the label “democratic” (it strains credulity to imagine that fascism, for example, would ever be afforded similar leeway in rebranding itself). Meanwhile, failing socialist experiments such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela — extolled among leftist intellectuals as a modern socialist success story only a few years ago — are brushed aside with the familiar refrain that they never achieved “real socialism.” The practical result of these ubiquitous word games is a political climate in which socialists never quite reckon with their own track record.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/plot-against-president-daniel-greenfield/

The Five W’s are the essential infrastructure of good journalism. It’s important to be able to tell a good story. But if the story doesn’t contain answers to who, what, where, when, and why, it’s meaningless.

Fortunately, Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President digs into the origin of the coup against President Trump in the old-fashioned Five W’s sense. While the book still leaves plenty of questions buried in reams of classified documents, it’s an excellent resource for organizing and making sense of the mess.

Rarely has a government investigation been clouded in this much secrecy or required so many investigations of the investigation. The points of the spiderweb between private contractors, the media, and government figures still vanish into darkness. But Smith follows the work of Rep. Devin Nunes and his team (the subtitle for the tome is The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History) and that comes with its own infrastructure of the Five W’s.

The ‘why’ isn’t hard to grasp, but the ‘when’ remains elusive. Smith makes a good case for the smear campaign associated with the Steele Dossier predating the former British operative whose continental credentials and FBI connections were used to sell a political assault ordered by the Clinton campaign.

Instead, Smith describes a series of ‘protodossiers’ which were used to eventually shape the Steele Dossier. These protodossiers were works in progress, bits of opposition research focusing on Trump’s international business connections, put together and fed to the media in a conventional fashion. There’s nothing especially controversial (or palatable) about this type of opposition research. But, even from the very beginning, these work products were not merely opposition research intended for the public.

Their real audience can be assessed from the linkages to Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, and a friend of Steele’s, who would act as a conduit for the Steele dossier, and the warnings that Trump was a national security threat. Accusing Trump of Russian ties was not a strategy meant to win an election. It was a justification for an unlimited investigation of Trump and his associates using methods and degrees of secrecy that would otherwise be off limits against Americans.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/yasmine-mohammeds-unveiled-must-read-danusha-v-goska/

“My whole body was suffocating. My head throbbed, and my skin oozed sweat from every pore … dressing like the kuffar was evil. I would go to hell if I dressed that way … when the Caliphate rises, if you’re not wearing hijab, how will you be distinguished from the nonbelievers? If you look like them, you’ll be killed like them … wearing a niqab [face veil] you feel like you’re in a portable sensory deprivation chamber. It impedes your ability to see, hear, touch, smell. I felt like I was slowly dying inside … I didn’t even know who I was anymore – if I even was somebody at all.”

Yasmine Mohammed is a spitfire, a term once applied both to World-War-II-era combat aircraft and to superstars like Jane Russell who played hotblooded women who didn’t let anyone push them around. Yasmine is a forty-something Canadian ex-Muslim, atheist, educator, and activist. (I’m going against convention here and referring to the author by her first name. She shares a last name with Islam’s prophet and founder, and I want to avoid confusion.)

Yasmine was raised by a strict Muslim mother who was the second wife of an equally strict stepfather. She was in an arranged marriage to an Al-Qaeda member. She left Islam and she is now married to a non-Muslim. Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam is her first book. And what a first book it is. Unveiled is a can’t-put-it-down instant classic. Authors Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, Kate McCord, Jean Sasson, Nawal el-Saadawi, and Phyllis Chesler, move over. There is a new star in your literary firmament.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-case-against-socialism/

Sen. Rand Paul just wrote a book, “The Case Against Socialism.”

I thought that case was already decided, since socialist countries failed so spectacularly.

But the idea hasn’t died, especially amongst the young.

“Hitler’s socialism, Stalin’s socialism, Mao’s socialism. You would think people would have recognized it by now,” says Paul in my latest video.

Paul echoes Orwell in likening socialism to “a boot stamping on the human face forever” and warning that it always leads to violence and corruption.

“You would think that when your economy gets to the point where people are eating their pets,” says Paul, contemplating the quick descent of once-rich Venezuela, “people might have second thoughts about what system they’ve chosen.”

That’s a reference to the fact that Venezuelans have lost weight because food is so hard to find.

“Contrast that with (the country’s) ‘Dear Leader’ Maduro, who’s probably gained 50 pounds,” Paul observes. “It really sums up socialism. There’s still a well-fed top 1%; they just happen to be the government or cronies or friends of the government.”

Naturally, American socialists say our socialism will be different.

https://www.jpost.com/
America abandoned European Jews during the Holocaust mainly because of two men: Franklin D. Roosevelt, US president during the Great Depression and World War II, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, then America’s foremost Jewish leader. In The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Dr. Rafael Medoff explores the influential actions of these two using new archival materials and interviews.

Medoff, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, examines FDR’s ingrained and long-standing antipathy toward Jews that led to indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews. The author illustrates how the president manipulated an esteemed rabbinical leader to keep Jewish protests in check and retain Jewish political support. Meanwhile, Rabbi Wise’s high-level political access engendered in him a sense of self-importance and a fear of fomenting antisemitism that led to his willingness to whitewash the president’s true sentiments and policies.

Medoff begins in 1933 when FDR opposed the American Jewish Congress’ boycott of Nazi Germany asserting harm to America’s economy. FDR refused to criticize the Nazis and undermined the boycott, replacing “Made in Germany” with German city names unrecognizable to most Americans. He kept silent even though he knew that books by Jewish writers were burned, Jews were banned from civil service and certain professions and their numbers limited in universities. He rejected the proposed boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics as “undue interference in American-German relations.”