RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-plague-of-radical-feminism-descends-upon-the-nation/

Despite its many falterings and regressions, the Judeo-Hellenic-Christian West over the long and tortuous course of its evolution has produced the most advanced civilization known to history. Characterized by the rule of law, scientific discovery, technological invention, educational opportunity for the masses, economic prosperity, individual autonomy and relative freedom from the harsh exactions of nature, it is now collapsing under the attack of forces rising from within its own existential frontiers.

Its internal assailants are myriad: domestic Marxism, “social justice,” global warming, Islam in its various avatars, anti-Semitism and hatred of Christianity, anti-white bigotry, educational decline, media malfeasance, and economic illiteracy leading to the willful accumulation of unpayable debt. But perhaps the most sinister and destructive of its homegrown adversaries is radical feminism, which seeks the ruin of motherhood and the breakdown of the relation between the sexes. It is a plague the Pharaoh was fortunately spared.

“Almost overnight,” writes Carrie Gress in The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity, “our once pro-life culture became pro-lifestyle, returning to an epicurean paganism that embraces everything that feels good.” How is it, she asks, that the women’s liberation movement “has demolished so decisively the moral and social structures of American society?” “There must be something more,” she answers, “than simple human vice behind the fact that millions of women have betrayed the most sacred and fundamental of relationships, that of mother and child,” leaving “husbands wondering what happened to their wives, fathers wondering what happened to their daughters, and children wondering what happened to their mothers.”

In the introduction to her book “The Red Thread- A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy” author Diana West asks: “What explains the law breaking lengths to which the highest government officials in Washington, D.C. have gone to stop the election of Donald Trump and then destroy his presidency?

”What indeed? These people were not the apparatchiks of the sixties who mimeographed anti American screeds in basements and couriered them on the subways.  They were not the whiners and prevaricators of the never-Trump media. They were not leftist academics preaching to credulous snowflakes.

As West meticulously demonstrates in this short, timely work, they operated at the highest levels of government agencies where they exerted power and prestige and seeded poison. The Ohrs-Nellie and Bruce, Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, ex British spy Christopher Steele, CIA Director and TV star John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, FBI conspirators and lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page invented dossiers, circulated rumors of collusion with Russia, crimes and coverups, all in the service of distracting and destroying a president.

Much of this has been disclosed, but West goes farther investigating the protagonists of the conspiracy. Drawing on interviews, published writings and academic papers, West builds vivid ideological profiles of anti-Trump conspirators who have otherwise remained enigmas to the public.

 As Frank J. Gaffney, Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy, notes in his foreword “Ms. West’s meticulous research lays bare the ideological thread that runs through all these lives….. a leitmotif of communist mentorship, progressivist education, Marxist indoctrination, and ultimately a willing abrogation of oaths of office in obedience to the diktat of an ideology rooted not in Philadelphia, but St. Petersburg and Moscow.

”In The Red Thread , Diana West,  indefatigable journalist and author employs the same investigative techniques and research used in her previous book “American Betrayal- : The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character” displaying, once again, her unique understanding of how history informs current events.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/18/author-historian-hanson-

Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson recently joined Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” program to talk about his latest book, “The Case for Trump.”

Q: This is one of those books where, considering how divisive and contentious this president is, you potentially would expect the reviews to involve people losing their minds. And just looking, people who probably don’t like President Trump all that much have read this book and feel as though it is really great look at what exactly is going on with the movement that got Trump elected. What are you finding in terms of response to this work?

A: You know, it’s a very interesting phenomenon because I traveled last week, and people who have read it, their only criticism is the title, and that was my publisher. They say, ‘Well, this is an analysis. It’s not that Trump is a saint or it’s not that he’s a sinner.’ You’re just dispassionately trying to analyze why people voted for him, why he won the nomination, what was the key to his red interior strategy, why he’s effective as a president so far and why people hate him, and what’s the prognosis.

I try to explain why in the book, this effort to provoke impeachment or the emoluments clause and the 25th Amendment or sue on the voting machines, to have this nonending Mueller investigation or McCabe and Rosenstein try to remove him somehow, or all of this assassination from celebrities — blow him up, decapitate him, shoot him, stab him — I don’t think we’ve ever seen that level of vitriol or anger.

There has to be a reason for it. In the book I suggest why he shouldn’t have won, and that he interrupted an invasion 16 years ago — Obama and Hilary’s transformation, in fundamental ways, of the country. There was something about him, without this political or military experience. If he were to succeed, what does that really tell us about the elite, this idea of credentialing and normal traditional experience and qualification that kind of says, ‘How did this guy get annualized 3 percent GDP growth and these other geniuses didn’t?’ and that’s a very revolutionary thing to think.

It’s kind of like looking at these admission scandals at all of these 20 universities and saying, ‘Wow, these people were always virtue signaling how wonderful they were in Hollywood and how great the universities are and they’re both corrupt.’ So I think Trump sort of reopened the floodgates and we’re examining from our attitude toward China to what a Ph.D. or a J.D. means or even a B.A. from Stanford. I think that’s good, I really do.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-red-thread.html

There is more blatant corruption, sniveling conspiracy, and underhanded intrigue revealed in Diana West’s new book, The Red Thread, than in the Kevin Spacey version of The House of Cards, which ran on Netflix from 2013 to 2018. The actors behind the attempted coup against Donald Trump, however, are bland, nondescript nonentities and mediocrities — James Comey, John Brennan, Christopher Steele, Nellie and Bruce Ohr, Reinhold Niebuhr (Who!?!!), the Kramer brothers, Bill Browder and his family, and a passel of others, none of them engaging actors, able to credibly project the immorality and villainy of their characters.

None of them is a Frank or Claire Underwood, though their insatiable hunger for power and control is not fictional and their appetite for power nearly cost this country the 2016 election. And the one character in the series I detested the most in House of Cards was Doug Stamper, Frank’s loyal assistant, “researcher,” gofer, arranger, blackmailer, and Mafia-like enforcer.
They don’t exude or broadcast evil or show any tell-tale signs of duplicity, malice, or a drooling unquenchable appetite for power or a penchant for lying and deceit. They’re about as average-looking as anyone you’d have to wait in line behind at a Wal-Mart check-out. We’re not dealing here with Jack-and-the Beanstock monsters, nor with Leviathans or Behemoths. But rather with a swarm of human termites.

The full title of West’s book is The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. Red Threads could be said to be an overture to West’s other knock-em-flat title, American Betrayal (reviewed by me twice (https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/06/our-enemy-inside-gates.html
https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2017/04/our-enemy-inside-gates-revisited.html), is a much longer work that details the rise of Communist influence in the U.S. in the 1930s and during the FDR years.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/the_moral_odyssey_of_an_american_doctor.html

Call it providential intervention or just the wisdom of a Chinese fortune cookie, but whatever the impetus, Dr. Richard Moss embarked on a journey to the Third World that he elucidates in his masterful book titled A Surgeon’s Odyssey — a book that deserves a space on everyone’s nightstand.

Moss, a son of the Bronx, was “exposed to most of the common pathologies of the inner city.” But he beat the odds when after 14 years of grueling study and training, he embarked on a journey that led him to Thailand, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. While working as a cancer surgeon from 1987-1990 he sought to ameliorate the suffering of people who lived under “extraordinarily horrifying circumstances.”

As a Board Certified Head and Neck Surgeon, Moss brought his skills to these people –many who had “unimaginable diseases at advanced stages and amidst tragic human suffering.” This volunteer stint was not for the fainthearted, as he documents the heartbreak he saw at every stage of his time working in the various countries. But the words of the fortune cookie were “Do not forsake your dream for material security,” and thus he began a journey that led him to “help the neglected and diseased” as well as “understand healing, its essence, and embrace it as something sacred.”

He admires the respect accorded him as dictated by Thai custom. He explains the quintessential Thai greeting of “wai” and how it underscores the importance of showing respect. He learns to understand the nuances of the Thai language where “depending on the tone” of one’s voice, a word could mean either “beautiful” or “bad luck.” He soaks in the nuances of a culture where even the act of walking reflects a smooth “never hurrying” approach, quite the opposite of the hustle and bustle of his New York City upbringing. He comes to view this contemplative walking as a “form of meditation helping to ward off the assault of modern life.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-dissidents-testimony-vladimir-bukovskys-judgment-in-moscow-now-in-english/
It’s the United States of America, and the year is 2019, and a hard-bitten old Commie named Bernie Sanders is, for the second time in a row, a popular candidate for the presidency. Meanwhile, the youngest and most high-profile new member of Congress is a staggeringly callow woman whose fatuously utopian rhetoric has made her a media darling. At the same time, the Democratic Party center itself is quickly lurching leftward, with once sensible politicians now spouting foolish and dangerous socialist bromides.

Some observers profess astonishment at these developments. In fact there’s no reason whatsoever for surprise. For one thing, as the legendary Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky laments in his book Judgment in Moscow (Ninth of November Press, $24.99 hardcover) — which appeared in French in 1995 and in Russian and German the year after, but is only now being published in English for the first time — the fall of the USSR was not followed by the kind of conspicuous moral reckoning and housecleaning that went on in Germany after Hitler’s defeat. There was no post-Soviet equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. Politburo and KGB members like Vladimir Putin, instead of being imprisoned or banished or fleeing to the Brazilian rainforest or the mountains of Bolivia, simply altered their public profiles and retained or resumed power in the new, purportedly post-Communist Russia.

As Bukovsky puts it: “To bring to justice those who took part in Nazi atrocities is a sacred task, the duty of one and all. But God forbid that you should so much as point a finger at a communist (let alone his fellow traveler); that is improper, a ‘witch hunt.’” How to convince the Western multitudes that Communism is horrible when its avatars were let off scot-free?

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/immune

We are at the dawn of a health revolution. Cancer physicians agree that immune therapies – the subject of the most recent Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – is a game-changer, and now sits alongside surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, as a mainstream option for the treatment of some types of cancer.

Crucially, neither of the two Nobel Prize winners, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo, directly set out to cure cancer – “that wasn’t it at all,” Allison has said – they were trying to understand how the immune system works. And this can’t be emphasised enough: curiosity-driven research won the prize and brought us new cancer medicines.

Some scientists do and should focus on understanding cancer or other diseases but we must also fund science which might seem esoteric – those who are merely asking what does this or that gene or protein do in the body – because so many of our greatest discoveries came out of left field. As cosmologist Martin Rees once wrote: “A research proposal to make flesh appear transparent wouldn’t have been funded, and even if it had been, the research surely wouldn’t have led to the X-ray.”

It was in trying to understand the details of what two specific receptor proteins did in the immune system which led Allison and Honjo to stumble upon our immune system’s brakes. They discovered brakes built into the immune system to dampen its activity after some time. Brakes act on the immune system to bring the body back to its normal resting level after a virus, for example, has been cleared from the body. This led to the idea of using medicines to block or switch off these brake receptors to unleash a stronger and longer-lasting immune response to better fight cancer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/bulwark-review-the-case-for-trump-response/

A sophist in service to self

I wrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark, and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting:

But in the coming months, he [Sykes] tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls” — those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them.

Though wishing to leave “a stench on them,” Schoenfeld instead gives us a sad exercise in self-abasement. And his review offers an illustration of the poverty of Never Trump personal venom and incoherence.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

In his review, Schoenfeld tosses out names such as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, the Third Reich Jew-haters in service to Hitler, to suggest, with a wink and nod, that I play a comparable role in relation to Trump.

Schoenfeld certainly has an odd sense of timing. The same day that Schoenfeld, an adjunct Hudson fellow, leveled his smears in The Bulwark, I was speaking at his own home Hudson Institute about the book. I discussed, among other things, Trump’s support for Israel and the dangerous anti-Semitic drift of the Democratic party, a theme I repeated again that evening on television.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/dr-crankleys-not-so-great-grandchildren-diana-west-analyzes-why-the-anti-trump-putschists-persist/

A review-essay of the new monograph The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy by Diana West.
“Running like a red thread through Communist teachings from the very inception of the movement is the note of total hostility to our form of government.”– from The Communist Party Of The United States Of America: What It Is. How It Works. A Handbook For Americans,” at a hearing by the Subcommittee To Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, December 21, 1955, P. 16. Strident never-Trumper Max Boot, quoted in a 3/2/2016 NY Times article, infamously encapsulated his unhinged vacuity on the subject of then-leading GOP Presidential contender Donald Trump by belching forth: “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump.”

Forgive the gentle, attentive reader of Diana West’s uniquely insightful, painstakingly researched new monograph, The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, for pausing to re-consider whether Boot’s sneering utterance was pure hyperbole.Whittaker Chambers, apostate from the Communist religion of immoralism, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto with a thoughtfully acid February 23, 1948 Time essay on Karl Marx and his legacy entitled “Dr. Crankley’s Children.”

The essay’s title derived from a pseudonym, “Dr. Crankley,” Marx adopted in a March 3, 1865 letter to his daughter. Chambers recounted Marx’s triumphal hypocrisy, producing a publication that declared itself an “organ of democracy” while admitting the “reality” that it “was nothing but a plan against democracy.” This behavior segued to “the first Party purges,” conducted by a man who despised “sentimental socialism” and was described by a contemporary thusly: “Baring his teeth, Marx will slaughter anybody who blocks his way.”

The inevitable progression of such dogma, and behaviors, observes Chambers, was Marx’s conclusion that he must “capture” the state with police power and establish his dystopian “dictatorship of the proletariat.” “Written down,” Chambers averred, “it was to become an extension of his own tyrannical political methods, the excuse for the most pitiless tyranny the world has ever seen.” Assessing what Marx bestowed through his ideological progeny, Chambers characterized three classes of Dr. Crankley’s children. Those Chambers dubbed the “children of pity,” epitomized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, concurred with Marx’s indictment of capitalism, but believed in an inexorable “steady bicycle ride toward socialism.” Benito Mussolini was Chambers’ archetype for the “children of hate,” who “put the machines and classes to work for war.”The third class of Dr. Crankley’s children “inherited the cold disciplined logic necessary for the serious pursuit of power.” Embodied by Lenin, who, “like Father Marx, knew what was best,” they were (and remain) the “most important and the most terrible of the Marxist brood.” Lenin, Chambers reminds us, “snatched away” democracy, “organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., a disciplined gang of power monopolists,” and his acolytes “smashed men freely.”With meticulously researched detail, and fearless, extraordinary originality of thought, Diana West’s remarkably compendious The Red Thread introduces us to key (not-so-) great-grandchildren of Dr. Crankley. Their continuing machinations amount to nothing less than an anti-Trump putsch.