RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/swirsky/190729

Since 9/11, writes Tabitha Korol in her riveting book, “Confronting The Deception: Inflamed by 9/11, fired up by eight bad years,” the United States, Israel, and cultures that still value our freedoms have been fighting a battle of survival on several fronts.

The primary battle, Korol explains, is with the ideology born out of the Islamic attempt to claim Ground Zero as its Caliphate – and from there, literally to conquer the United States of America.

The religious-political-supremacist system of Islam was invented in the seventh century and has since led a relentless drive to take over the world, establish a caliphate ruled by Shariah Law – the law that mandates cutting off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, throwing homosexuals off roofs to their deaths, engaging in “honor killings” of teenage girls whose behavior they disapprove of, and killing all Jews. That sharia law.

It is no surprise that this megalomaniacal goal has captured the imagination of leftists worldwide, including in our country, who share Islam’s goals, particularly of destroying America – the “Big Satan” – and Israel, the “Little Satan.”

This is a battle being fueled by the Shadow Government of the United States of America, specifically those forces – many from the Muslim Brotherhood – that have been implanted in the highest reaches of our government – including Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the State Department, even the Oval Office – by the Obama regime, many of whom remain quite stealthily in their positions today.

In the 1930s and ’40s, there were any number of American communists so enamored of Joseph Stalin and the shining tomorrows he promised that they would do anything for the Soviet Union, disdaining payment of any kind.

David Karr was not one of them.

Karr, writes Harvey Klehr in his riveting biography of the man, was something else entirely: He was the young American communist on the make, his eye “ever alert for the main chance,” his hand ever open to Soviet largess. Born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of Jewish immigrants, he gained access to power—and methodically amassed a $10 million fortune—by his wits, intelligence, radiant personality and, above all else, a matchless talent for Soviet-American networking. His early career was that of an idealistic sympathizer, working first as a freelancer for communist and far-left periodicals, including the Daily Worker. His later career, however, saw him assume an array of overlapping, ever-shifting personae, “from muckraking columnist to public relations flack, from corporate raider to corporate executive, from moviemaker to hotel executive, from business fixer to Olympic Committee confidant.”

According to some sources—and to stories unverifiable because the corroborating evidence remains classified or kept from public view by his former associates—Karr was also an “arms smuggler, . . . protector of Jewish emigrants from Russia, [and] behind-the-scenes political fixer.” Throughout it all, writes Mr. Klehr, “Karr cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies, tried to act as a middleman between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. on several issues, and attempted to get close to American officials and politicians at the behest of the KGB.” He had an uncanny ability to befriend major American business figures, including corporate raider Art Landa, health-care innovator Henry Kaiser and Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer. He knew or met with every president from FDR to Gerald Ford and was a trusted adviser to many politicians, including Sargent Shriver, Scoop Jackson and Jerry Brown.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/review-the-notorious-ben-hecht-iconoclastic-writer

Julien Gorbach’s The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is the second book to come out this year on the reporter, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, novelist, polemicist, and pioneer of the gangster movie and the screwball comedy. Hecht is a more remarkable character than any he created in his hugely successful Hollywood career. (It has received far less attention than the first biography, Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, largely because she beat him to market.)

Gorbach’s focus is different from that of any other Hecht biographer. All the others, including Hecht’s own autobiography A Child of the Century, devote no more than a fifth of their space to Hecht’s “Jewish period.” Gorbach turns the customary allotment on its head, devoting four fifths of his biography to this phase of Hecht’s life. The disproportion is warranted, both because the other aspects of Hecht’s life have been well-covered by previous biographers and because, in the end, Hecht will be best remembered for his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust and for his support of the Irgun, the underground organization in Palestine that deserves chief credit—as Winston Churchill himself attested—for driving the British from Palestine.

For most of his life Hecht was an assimilated Jew, indifferent although never hostile to his Jewish roots. Hecht wrote that he “turned into a Jew in 1939.… The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, brought my Jewishness to the surface.” When he thought of the Jews being slaughtered in Europe, he thought of his own kin, cherishing the memories of his warm, Yiddish-speaking extended family, which “remained like a homeland in my heart.”

As Hecht became more politically aware, he wrote columns for the newspaper PM. In one, titled “My Tribe Called Israel,” Hecht said, “I write of Jews today, I who never knew himself as one before, because that part of me which is Jewish is under a violent and ape-like attack.” It was these columns that caught the attention of Peter Bergson, who led a small group of Palestinian Jews recently arrived in the United States to build support for a Jewish army to fight Hitler. After some coaxing, Hecht joined their effort.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/while-we-all-have-mueller-on-the-brain/

You might want to get hold of Andy McCarthy’s timely and terrific forthcoming book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, which you can pre-order from the publisher, Encounter Books, here (its official release date is August 13th). While we’re at it, here’s a snippet from Andy’s introduction:

As for collusion, that word we’ve heard so incessantly from pundits and leaky government officials, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has rendered his judgment that there was none — at least, not the collusion he was hunting for. There really was a collusion plot, though. And it really did target our election system. It absolutely sought to usurp our capacity for self-determination. It was just not the collusion you’ve been told about. It was not “Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia.” 

Here is the real collusion scheme: in 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment. This scheme had two parts: Plan A, the objective; and Plan B, a fail-safe strategy in case Plan A imploded — which all the smartest people were supremely confident would never, ever happen . . . which is why you could bet the ranch that it would. 

Plan A was to get Mrs. Clinton elected president of the United States. This required exonerating her, at least ostensibly, from well-founded allegations that were both felonious and politically disqualifying. 

Plan B was the insurance policy: An investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he were elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton campaign– generated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage. An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump un-re-electable under the guise of building an impeachment case.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/07/29/a-herd-has-no-mind/

Funny thing about my new book: I had begun shopping around the proposal for writing it long before my brief period of employment with that other magazine and the subsequent witless chimp-brained media freakout and Caffeine-Free Diet Maoist struggle session that followed and climaxed with my being fired by Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg on my third day of employment there and after a good deal of stink eye from some seething young woman with an unfortunate All-Lesbian World Bowling Champion haircut loitering glumly in the coffee room. I was, for a few days, a writer who was much more read about than read. After the ninth (or so) New York Times denunciation of my soul and my work, my professional dance card began to fill up with pleasing speed.

That’s the upside of being in the controversy business: I always get paid. Hooray for me.1

But why was I flogging this book way back before I got involved in what I must with some genuine disappointment characterize as only the second-most-infamous episode involving a shady right-winger and the Watergate complex?2 There were good reasons. A number of disturbing sociopolitical meltdowns combining deep stupidity with casual authoritarianism already had taken place: the firing of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for his views on marriage, and the IRS’s criminal leak of the National Organization for Marriage’s confidential tax documents in the service of a campaign to harass and attack its donors; the firing of James Damore for the crime of being stupid enough to believe that his po-faced ham-souled Caitlyn-haunted superiors at Google were being anything like halfway serious when they asked for dialogue about diversity in the firm; the campaigns against Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss at the New York Times; the “deplatforming”3 of conservatives and other nonconforming voices on social media; the violence and firebombings targeting unpopular speakers at Berkeley and other college campuses; and much more. The blackshirts and the American Association of Outrage Professionals were as creepily tumescent as Anthony Weiner cruising a Hello Kitty boutique, and there was outrage-porn aplenty, rampant, unapologetic, depraved — but my little book proposal was met with almost no excitement until I became, for a couple of weeks, the headline in the story.

I revisit that tawdry little episode in the book, to the extent that it is necessary to the story, but it isn’t a memoir. My subject is not the life and times of Kevin D. Williamson.4 My subject is what Coriolanus5 called “the beast with many heads” — mob politics, on social media and in what passes for real life, which increasingly is patterned on social media — and its effects on our political discourse and our culture. It is the most important political issue of our time. Discourse — the health and character of that discourse — is a force that exists above and outside the specific policy questions of the day; it is the master issue that will determine how every other issue is talked about and thought about — and whether those issues are thought about at all.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“Conservatives are not reactionaries. As Burke said, ‘we must reform in orderto conserve,’ or, in more modern  idiom: we must adapt. But we adapt to change in the name of continuity, in order to conserve what we are and what we have “Roger Scruton (1944-)

Labels are misleading. The terms “liberal” or “conservative” confuse substance with abstractions. To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty, labels mean whatever we want them to mean. If told I am conservative is it meant I am a tightwad in fiscal matters? Does it mean I favor martial law to a democratic process? Does it mean I am antediluvian in cultural ways? Does it mean I am anti-progress, preferring the past to the future? Does it mean I am racist, xenophobic or misogynist? Does it mean all, or none of the above? I know what I mean when I claim to be conservative, but do others?  For me, conservatism is about freedom – free to speak, write, assemble and pray. But it also includes respect for tradition and for the opinions of others; being responsible for one’s actions and accountable to other. It means a belief in the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a commitment to values, like honor and duty. I believe strongly in family and in loyalty, and that the Constitution provided freedom for religion, not from religion. I believe government is an instrument of the people, not the other way around; that we must be ruled by laws, not men; it assumes a vigorous military, but one reflective of the nation’s citizens and under the control of a civilian president; it is the welcoming of legal immigrants and those legitimately seeking asylum; and it is an understanding that debt, while having useful purposes, when excessive has consequences, including political pressure to keep interest rates artificially low.

The subtitle of Mr. Scruton’s short book is “An Introduction to the Great Tradition,” and that is what this book is – a primer on conservativism, a guide through the history of the discipline.  “…modern conservatism arose as a defence of the individual against potential oppressors, and an endorsement of popular sovereignty.” But it also recognizes the role communities and government must play in civil society. In institutions and traditions, there are kernels of wisdom without which, Mr. Scruton writes, “…the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.”

My friend and e-pal Sydney Williams, has, to my great regret, announced that he will no longer write these monthly columns which so many of us enjoy so much. For more of his good writing and opinions go to:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sydney+williams&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

Dear Mary: Letters Home from the 10th Mountain Division (1944–1945) by Williams III, Sydney M. | Jul 19, 2019

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The world is complicated. It has always been so. Resources are limited, but man’s mind is limitless. We live on a planet with just over two acres of inhabitable land per inhabitant. But that fact, and the limits implied, speaks to man’s remarkable ability to survive and thrive. But neither surviving nor thriving is easy, nor can we assume we always will. Man is a social animal. He has survived through intuition, and he has thrived through what Adam Smith called the division of labor that increases social and economic dependency. To advance his interests, man created communities, governments, rule of law and markets. Two hundred years ago, no one could have conceived of the social, cultural and technological advances that allow us to live today as we do. No one today can now predict what the world two hundred years hence will be like. Will man blow himself up? Will natural forces cause our extinction? Will warring factions and competing economic systems persist and worsen? Or, will technology and cultural changes continue to improve living standards? Will we live in harmony? No one knows.

What we do know is that classically liberal governments and free markets have allowed unprecedented improvement in living standards and extensions of life. Now, free market capitalism, which goes hand-in-hand with democracy, is under attack by progressives who are ignorant of history and who do not understand basic economics. The question, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin from 1776, is can we keep our republican government and the capitalist system we have created, which has served us and the world so well? Or will we make a radical turn toward socialism? We cannot take past successes for granted.