RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/david-mamets-tribute-to-trump/

Like the late David Horowitz, David Mamet, now 77, was a red-diaper baby who, after spending the first act of his career as a prominent member of the left, eventually had second thoughts. Horowitz announced his change of mind in a 1985 Washington Post article, co-authored with his writing partner Peter Collier, headlined “Lefties for Reagan”; Mamet went public with his own political metamorphosis in a 2008 Village Voice essay entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” In the years since, Mamet, whose oeuvre already included first-rate plays like Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and top-notch screenplays like Wag the Dog (1997) and Hannibal (2001), has published a slew of wise – and wise-ass – books about politics, culture, and the arts, including Recessional (2022), which I summed up as follows: “What, you ask, does he write about? Answer: What doesn’t he write about?”

Like Recessional, Mamet’s new collection of essays, The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment, also covers a wide range of topics: the glories of his hometown, the Windy City (“The culture of the Western world is American, which is to say Chicagoan”); the destructiveness of American schools under the aegis of the Department of Education; the mediocrity of poetry (or, at least, New Yorker poetry); the corruption of art museums; the the fraudulence of climate-change orthodoxy; the greatness of Shakespeare; the nature of heaven. While I agree with Mamet almost all the time, I must admit that I dissent from a handful of his robust assertions. “Government, like Circe, turns men into swine,” he states. Does it really? Or does it instead, I wonder, attract men who already are swine?

Unsurprisingly, given his long career as a Hollywood writer and director, many of Mamet’s reflections are about cinema (which was the focus of his delightful 2024 book Everywhere an Oink Oink): the preposterousness of the current Oscar rules, which demand that the credits of nominated pictures include a certain number of minority-group members; the lameness of most of today’s film dialogue (“few,” he insists, “can write dramatic dialogue”) and film music (nowadays, he feels, “all film scores sound alike”); and the absurdity of the concept of “Method acting” (“there is no such thing as ‘The Method’”). Ditto on all counts, although I beg to disagree, again, with the claim that the imposition of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934–68) resulted in three decades of cinematic “drivel.” Drivel? Casablanca? Random Harvest? The Good Earth? Citizen Kane? Really?

One of America’s greatest living literary legends invites you think for yourself in this compelling narrative of manipulation, power, and the human condition.

“Government, like Circe, turns men into swine,” David Mamet writes in his latest political tour de force. Prepare to be challenged, enlightened, and entertained by The Disenlightenment as Mamet dissects the modern world with enthusiasm, wisdom, and lots of references to movies about the mafia.

Once a stalwart of liberal thought, Mamet now turns his penetrating gaze on the cultural milieu that nurtured his artistic growth, revealing how America’s elites have twisted our institutions into tools of manipulation. With his one-of-a-kind wit, he exposes the intricate dance between power and myth, unmasking how the elites manipulate media and culture to maintain control.

The Disenlightenment fearlessly tackles topics from war to love, success to death, offering a fresh perspective on the human condition. His observations, ranging from the carnival-like nature of politics to the power of language, reflect a society where traditional values are under siege.

This book is an opportunity to engage with one of the most provocative and insightful writers of the modern era. Whether you’re a long-time Mamet aficionado or new to his work, The Disenlightenment promises to challenge your perceptions, stimulate your mind, and perhaps change how you view the world.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/06/the_grand_deception_of_islam_as_a_religion_of_peace.html

A database search of 12 million books published in the 300 years before 9/11 reveals only one instance of the phrase “Islam is a religion of peace.” It appears in fiction and is spoken by Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, an Iranian leader in Tom Clancy’s thriller Executive Orders.

But the dangerous notion that Islam is peaceful has been so frequently reiterated by world leaders, clerics, and the liberal media-academia complex that it has taken on the status of COWDUNG—a facetious near-acronym for ‘conventional wisdom of the dominant group.’

Denying 1,400 years of history, these apologists would have us believe that extremist Islam is a perversion. Their sanitized version presents Islam’s prime motif of violent jihad—or religious war against infidels—as an individual’s “inner struggle” for spiritual growth.

To expose these falsehoods—which have circled the globe before the truth even got out of bed—conservative authors Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin wrote Mohammed’s Koran: Why Muslims Kill for Islam. First published in 2017, the bestselling book saw a second edition and faced an Amazon ban in 2019. (Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and many terror manuals remain available.)

In light of Robinson’s early release from a British prison a few days ago, an overview of this important book seems fitting. The authors assert that the key to understanding what the Koran signifies to Muslims is naskh, an interpretive guideline indicating that in the Koran, what comes after negates what precedes it. Later verses remain valid even if they contradict earlier ones.

By presenting the Koran in reverse chronological order, the authors allow us to see how quotes on peace and the absence of compulsion in religion that Islam’s apologists cherry-pick hold little significance because they precede more violent dictates. The authors utilize a widely popular 1930 translation of the Koran by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, a British convert to Islam, while shedding light on a deception it created. More on that later.

Their 101-page introduction outlines the history of Mohammed’s religion and its misrepresentation after 9/11. It mentions that in the 19th and 20th centuries, authors as diverse as Winston Churchill and Samuel Huntington could openly criticize Islam as frenzied and violent. British Prime Minister William Gladstone (1809-98) proclaimed that “So long as there is this book, there will be no peace in the world.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/28/the-post-woke-world/
This is an excerpt from The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.

It was an extraordinary scene. Donald Trump, recently re-elected as president of the United States, found himself surrounded by women and girls in the East Room of the White House. The date was 5 February 2025, and Trump was signing an executive order entitled ‘Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports’. As the US president took to his desk and prepared his pen, he invited his all-female audience to draw closer. ‘Secret service is worried about them?’, he joked. ‘If we have to worry about them we have big problems.’ There was laughter, applause, a hubbub of palpable relief that an egregious social injustice was on the cusp of being corrected. Photographers captured the moment in a flurry of snapping shutters. Would this be the image that marked the beginning of our post-woke era, the first phase of sobering up for a once drunken world?

The significance of this event could not be dismissed as a mere publicity stunt. Here was one of the most controversial Republican presidents in history, a man who had been accused repeatedly of misogyny, nevertheless enacting the most pro-feminist directive since Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments in June 1972, a measure that prohibited sex-based discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.

The culture war of our times has often been misinterpreted as a conflict between left and right. But, as I shall argue, these designations are hangovers from the French Revolution, ill-suited to today’s complex ideological skirmishes.

The sudden rise in the early 2010s of critical social justice ideology – that sprawling, complex and disparate movement known colloquially as ‘woke’ – has meant that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have lost much of their utility. Definitions of ‘woke’ are as varied as can be imagined, but it is best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means. Yet for all its institutional clout, this ideology has never enjoyed popular support. Estimates by More in Common, a nonprofit organisation committed to the promotion of social cohesion, suggest that, at its height, the woke movement was endorsed by approximately eight per cent of the population of both the US and the UK. As such, its power could only ever be sustained through misdirection and imposition.

We now find ourselves entering a new phase of the culture war, one in which the woke ideology is being tamed and will soon relinquish its chokehold on the Western world. The death rattles have become so audible that they can no longer be gainsaid. Major companies such as McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford, Amazon, Google and Meta have scaled back their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. Black Lives Matter is now a largely discredited movement. Leftist politicians, such as Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and former US secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg, have quietly removed the pronouns from their social-media profiles. Multiple sporting bodies have barred men who identify as women from competing in female categories. Gay-rights groups are rejecting the forced teaming with divisive LGBTQIA+ campaigns. The UK Supreme Court has ruled that ‘sex’ means ‘biological sex’ for the purposes of equality law, meaning that men who identify as women have no legal right to enter women-only spaces – the Telegraph ran with the frontpage headline, ‘Trans women are not women’.