RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/how_the_west_was_lost_at_oxford_university.html

Once upon a time, we were told that the peoples of the Western world — which includes countries like Australia and New Zealand, although located in the Eastern Hemisphere — are heirs and trustees of Western civilization, imbalances and excesses included.  Often referred to simply as “the West,” Western civilization is a broad concept used to understand the cultural, social, political, and economic norms, traditions, values, and institutions that originated in or are associated with Europe.  It has its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome as well as in Christianity, humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It values rationalism, democracy, and individual freedoms and rights.

Later on, Marxist and otherwise far-left historians argued that the history of the West is marked by exploitation and conflict among different social classes, from feudal lords and serfs in the Middle Ages to capitalists and workers in the modern era.  Marxists, in particular, introduced the concept of cultural hegemony, formulated by Antonio Gramsci to describe ideological domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.  In other words, according to this type of approach, the dominant cultural norms and values of Western civilization serve to maintain the power of the ruling class.

As of now, the left-wing narrative is that Western civilization is an illusion.  Postmodern and deconstructionist historians have claimed that the West is a late invention of the 18th-century philosopher. Skeptical of the grand narratives that have historically been used to describe Western civilization, such as progress, enlightenment, etc., they argue that these narratives often oversimplify complex histories and marginalize alternative perspectives.

It is in this context that the new book How the World Made the West, written by Josephine Quinn, professor of ancient history at Oxford University, needs to be read.  It’s aimed to bring to fulfillment the goal and the dream of legions of leftists the world over and from time immemorial.  Quinn’s purpose is not to trash what generations of schoolchildren and college students have been taught to take pride in as Western values and achievements.  Rather, she wants to demolish the underlying concept of what she calls “civilizational thinking,” which suggests that there is no such thing as “Western civilization.”  By the way, as she puts it, this “civilizational thinking” provided the cultural rationale for western European supremacy during the 19th century, enabling colonial expansion and racial hierarchies.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27820/chapter-21-montessori-and-drag-queen-story-hour

For readers who may be under the impression that private schools are exempt from the humanitarian hoax of whole child education and its sociopolitical intent, I have included an informative article written by retired Montessori educator Charlotte Cushman, published online in American Thinker[i] and on her website, Authentic Montessori Education,[ii] on January 21, 2023.

Charlotte Cushman taught the Montessori Method for over 40 years, and co-owned and operated two Montessori schools. She is appalled by today’s woke (Marxist) trend in Montessori, and advocates a return to authentic Montessori and its founder’s principles:

Not in the service of any political or social creed should the teacher work, but in the service of the complete human being, able to exercise in freedom, a self-disciplined will and judgement, unperverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear. ––Maria Montessori

The Real Purpose of Drag Queen Story Hour

By Charlotte Cushman

Those who have voiced concerns about the dangers that drag events, such as Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), pose for children (namely, sexualization and grooming) have been told that those concerns are baseless, that the events are harmless, that it is all just entertainment and fun, and that attending drag events is a way to understand the gay culture.

On January 25, 2021 an academic paper entitled “Drag pedagogy: the playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood” was published online in Curriculum Inquiry, an educational journal. The paper, recently called out by James Lindsay here and here and also by Christopher F. Rufo here, was written by Harper Keenen and Lil Miss Hot Mess (a founder of DQSH), who describe themselves as “a genderqueer drag performer/scholar and a trans scholar.” (p. 443)

Right off the bat, the abstract tells us the purpose of DQSH:

Ultimately, the authors propose that “drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly. (p. 440)

Then the authors state,

Through this programme, drag artists…[are] positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?

https://townhall.com/columnists/horacecooper/2024/06/01/living-in-a-free-society-is-not-a-passive-endeavor-n2639748#google_vignette

For years, the progressive Left, ambitious self-serving politicians, and the elites of the administrative state have chipped away at the American dream, the promise of opportunity, and the shared reverence for the founding principles of our society that once propelled our success. Though it may seem like America is beyond saving, the best days of America are yet to come, says George Landrith, all we have to do is let freedom ring…again.

George Landrith III’s “Let Freedom Ring… Again: Can Self-Serving Truths Save America from Further Decline?” is an exceptionally compelling work that portrays the uncertainty of America’s future and the urgency with which we must act to save America from its current trajectory into darkness. The book, filled with insightful thoughts from Landrith, skillfully diagnoses the problems afflicting American politics and the Left at large while also providing carefully crafted solutions that offer hope for a better future.

Throughout the book, Landrith accurately exposes the Left’s parasitic relationship with their voters. From enticing welfare programs to failing schools, “Whenever leftists propose a solution to society’s problems, they make themselves more powerful and/or they make the people more dependent,” says Landrith.

This intentional feat of Leftist policy is best seen in California, where not so long ago Governor Gavin Newsom passed California’s AB5. In an effort to “protect workers,” California essentially banned independent contractors, forcing small businesses to hire people they can’t afford, putting gig workers like independent truckers out of the job. Indeed, since its inception, AB5 has destroyed self-employment, making exodus or welfare the only option for many Californians.

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27806/chapter-20-in-their-own-words-the-sexual

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Planned Parenthood[i] is the instrument of “transformative sexual change” in the United States. Marketed as scientificand evidence-based, transformative sexual change advocates changing restrictive laws that hinder the exercise of reproductive rights, and transforming social norms that perpetuate prejudices on reproductive rights. Over 40 percent of the organization’s revenue comes from your tax dollars in the form of government reimbursements and grants. Planned Parenthood (PP) is a political organization that disguises its political agenda as health education. My last book, The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage (Chapter 10, “The Scheme and the Schemers Determined to Reeducate America”), exposes Planned Parenthood’s infiltration of the classroom, and its catastrophic Marxist agenda.

In an August 20, 2020, Daily Signal article, “Problematic Women: Planned Parenthood Ideology ‘Killing the Family,’ Ex-Volunteer Says,”[ii] Monica Cline, former volunteer and “comprehensive sex educator” at Planned Parenthood, is quoted. She explains how children were being pressured and deliberately sexualized in school because no adult was offering them the alternative of abstinence.

At one point she asks a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, “Guys, do you realize you don’t have to have sex? You don’t have to have oral sex, vaginal sex, or anal sex. And if you don’t, you never have to come in contact with someone else’s body fluids.” A little girl raised her hand and said, “Ma’am, no one has ever told us that.” That was the turning point for Monica Cline. She finally and fully understood:

There is a “huge movement to normalize childhood sex.” The sex education program of Planned Parenthood is “encouraging children to dehumanize themselves and each other, making them sexually active at a young age, normalizing every sexual behavior…. By doing that those children become dependent on getting condoms and contraceptives and getting treated, and yes, even getting abortions. And so, once that dependency occurs, and the parent who is purposely left out of the picture, there’s no one else who’s really guiding those children…. They empathize with them and say, “Oh, yeah. Your mom and dad would probably be really mad to know you are sexually active. But we know it is perfectly normal, and we’re here to help you.” … It sounds so positive. But what they are really doing is creating a barrier between a family and their child, the guidance of a parent.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds—and how she almost did, too.

As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco  neighbors and friends—until she started questioning  whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.

In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.

Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.

“In The End of Everything, Hanson tells compelling and harrowing stories of how civilizations perished. He helps us consider contemporary affairs in light of that history, think about the unthinkable, and recognize the urgency of trying to prevent our own demise.” — H. R. McMaster, author of Battlegrounds

War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. Modern societies are not immune from the horror of a war of extinction. 
 
In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again. 

The secret history of the American Left.

The Left is America’s oldest enemy.

It was here long before the 1960s, calling for the execution of George Washington, plotting to stop the ratification of the Constitution, and collaborating with foreign enemies.

Stolen elections, fake news, race riots, globalism, and socialism aren’t new problems; Americans faced them from the very beginning.

Domestic Enemies reveals the true origins of the Democratic Party and its radicals, who—even two centuries ago—were calling for the redistribution of wealth, the end of marriage, and the use of schools for political indoctrination.

From political battles to street fights, Domestic Enemies takes you into the heart of a century of forgotten struggles between America’s greatest heroes—such as Washington, Hamilton, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln—and radical villains like Aaron Burr.

This is a 1619 Project for the American Left: a history of the Democrats as you’ve never heard it before, told through the political debates, naval battles, race riots, scandals, secret societies, and domestic terrorism that made the Left what it is today.

Learn how the Founding Fathers defeated the Left before, and how we can beat it again.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-physicist-investigates-the-left/

“All branches of Leftism, including Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Statism, Marxism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and National Socialism” share a common ancestor, Gary Gindler argues in his new book, ‘Left Imperialism: From Cardinal Richelieu to Klaus Schwab’.

Blending political philosophy and a history of ideology, ‘Left Imperialism’ dives into the origins of the globalist leftist movements and their fundamental opposition to American conservatism.

The Left has been on an apocalyptic collision course with America and the free world for its entire existence, but ‘Left Imperialism’ traces its evolution as an ideology from local class warfare to a global movement, from seeking socialism within a nation to global socialism that permeates the world as a network of ideological institutions dominating the planet.

A former Soviet physicist who helped pioneer the Russian internet, Gary Gindler has long been a voice of reasoned political analysis in this country. And in ‘Left Imperialism, he delves into the waves of political change and the larger transformative ideological phenomena behind them.

Gindler focuses his analysis on the supreme power of the state over the individual and the clash of power relations between the government and the governed. From high taxes to state control and then ownership of private enterprises, the power of the state expands, like a balloon filling with air to simultaneously dominate the space within its sphere and to crowd out everything else. Socialism invariably leads to totalitarianism because the assertion of control is foundational to its agenda which requires organizing society through the manipulation of people and institutions in order to achieve its desired economic outcomes.