RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-dumbest-generation-grows-up-is-one-smart-book/

There is a sense abroad that generational change has placed the essentials of our constitutional system and its supporting culture at risk. Many Millennials — the generation now in their 20s and 30s — have soured, not only on fundamentals like freedom of speech, but on the American story as such. Various writers have tried to make sense of this disturbing cultural shift. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt highlight a certain style of parenting. Mary Eberstadt explores the implications of family decline. Now, Mark Bauerlein, in his new book, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, adds some crucial missing pieces to the puzzle. His focus — social media and education — may seem well-worn, but you’ve never seen them approached like this.

I’ll get to substance, but first I want to address the striking tone of the book. Although the work is well-documented and thoughtfully argued, the overall feel is singular and unconventional. There is something “prophetic” about this book. I don’t mean “prophetic” in the sense of “predicting the future,” although Bauerlein’s 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, to which this is a follow-up, did in fact foresee, against the then-reigning idealization of the Millennials, many of the problems they’re experiencing today.

No, I mean that Bauerlein’s willingness to openly and uncompromisingly confront, and in a sense denounce face to face, America’s young — as well as the Boomer mentors who failed them — has the ring of the biblical prophets about it. After publishing The Dumbest Generation, Bauerlein was invited by many colleges and universities to address their students (and professors) in person. After taking his audiences to task for devoting more attention to selfies and “likes” than to serious history and art, Bauerlein would often find himself booed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/05/an_awakening_conservatives_vs_progressives.html

George C. Leef has written a wonderful, definitive book that lays out the difference between self-identified progressives and conservatives.  The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale: A Political Fable for Our Time is a fictionalized narrative about a Washington Post journalist — a progressive leftist, of course — who is chosen to write an official biography of the first female president, Patricia Farnsworth.  The facts of this woman’s eight years in office are essentially the Obama/Biden two terms in all but name.  Their destructive policies, briefly interrupted by the successful presidency of Donald Trump, are all in play again.  The Supreme Court has been packed.  Offending statues have been duly destroyed.  Riots and protests are endemic, often staged for political purposes.  Opponents of the left have been virtually silenced.  The book feels as though it was written in just the past few weeks, so accurate are the devastating consequences of progressive policies Americans are enduring under Biden.

Van Arsdale is at first thrilled at the opportunity to write about the woman she has long considered heroic.  She has written numerous columns celebrating Farnsworth’s policies, implemented to transform America without regard for the Constitution.  Both women pride themselves on their successful gambits that have destroyed opponents and won elections.  Farnsworth even brags about having ballots ready to submit if needed.  Arsdale is selected because she is particularly skilled at constructing progressive narratives to go with any event, policy, or disaster without letting facts get in her way.  She has fully embraced the dictates of gender and identity politics.  She knows how to slant any story, how to obscure inconvenient facts in order to make any column suitably progressive.  As a lover of classical music, she attends concerts in disguise because, among her friends and colleagues, classical music is “problematic” since most composers were white.  She would have heartily supported the We See You White American Theater manifesto.  Shakespeare is also “problematic.”

The first memoir about the “reeducation” camps by a Uyghur woman.
 
“I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.”
— Gulbahar Haitiwaji toParis Match

Since 2017, more than one million Uyghurs have been deported from their homes in the Xinjiang region of China to “reeducation camps.” The brutal repression of the Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide, and reported widely in media around the world. The Xinjiang Papers, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, expose the brutal repression of the Uyghur ethnicity by means of forced mass detention­—the biggest since the time of Mao.
 
Her name is Gulbahar Haitiwaji and she is the first Uyghur woman to write a memoir about the ‘reeducation’ camps. For three years Haitiwaji endured hundreds of hours of interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, and nights under blinding neon light in her prison cell.
 
These camps are to China what the Gulags were to the USSR. The Chinese government denies that they are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism,” and calls them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter. Her courageous memoir is a terrifying portrait of the atrocities she endured in the Chinese gulag and how the treatment of the Uyghurs at the hands of the Chinese government is just the latest example of their oppression of independent minorities within Chinese borders.
 
The Xinjiang region where the Uyghurs live is where the Chinese government wishes there to be a new “silk route,” connecting Asia to Europe, considered to be the most important political project of president Xi Jinping.

Written by a Soviet émigré and scholar of Marxism, the book begins with the author’s recounting of the end of the Cold War. Despite the common perception that democracy defeated communism, the author presents evidence that the Democratic Party has adopted Marxism in a new philosophy he calls Liberal Bolshevism. Mr. Markovsky trucks the origins of Liberal Bolshevism back to the policies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and chronicles the transformation of the Democratic Party into the Social Democratic Party. Through the prism of Marxism the author traces the rhythms and patterns of the toxic amalgamation of liberalism and socialism from Lenin to Obama and binds together the Democratic Party’s policies into a Marxist-socialist cause that American Social Democrats, just like their Soviet predecessors, are committed to achieving at all costs.

Herein, the reader will find a reassessment of accepted postulates exposing the deeply rooted racism and anti-Semitism of the Democratic Party. The book also challenges vested views of socialism and capitalism. Overall, the work is intended as a dissident course of economics and political education.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/30/reviling-the-west/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

EXCERPT:

The story Murray tells here is less about the old fault lines in our civilization than it is about our strange susceptibility to believing the worst about ourselves. He doesn’t really venture an explanation of this pathology, though he locates its essential basis in the willingness of Westerners to credit the idea that white people are somehow transcendentally racist — unlike the rest of humanity, which is apparently graced with innate tolerance and respect for human difference. 

As a compendium of the absurdities of our age, The War on the West would be hard to surpass. As an explanation of our descent into this Boschian hell-scape, Murray’s book is circumspect. He calls attention to how those who revile our civilization steadfastly refuse to apply the same standards to any other culture or society. He observes — as have many others — that many people outside the West see with perfect lucidity that the West is both fundamentally different from and better than their own cultural legacies, and for that reason they seek to come to Western societies. They are immune to the cultural self-loathing invented by Western intellectuals, so rampant in all our key institutions. 

Murray lays out the optimistic possibility that we will discover a way “to make our multi-ethnic realities work.” But he worries that something like the opposite is taking shape: a form of Western identity along “exclusionary lines,” i.e., meeting hatred of the West with reciprocal hatred of those who slander it. Of course, the third possibility is that those who foment anti-Westernism will prevail and impose their own oppressive dystopia, not unlike what already exists on many college and university campuses. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/idiot-grandson-haitian-general-explains-why-he-daniel-greenfield/

Elie Mystal, the grandson of a Haitian general and the son of a lying politician, made headlines when he told the fellow constitutional scholars of The View, that the Constitution is “trash”.

The idiot racist son of a Haitian immigrant, whose gratitude for the country that took in his worthless family is only matched by his aptitude for wearing his hair like it was just caught in an exploding vacuum cleaner, was on tour to promote his book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, by insulting the document that allows him to do so.

Despite (or because of) a degree from Harvard Law, Mystal can barely spell “Constitution”.

That hasn’t stopped MSNBC from having him on every 5 minutes to offer deep thoughts on how everything is racist, the Founding Fathers were dumb and the Constitution is terrible.

In his book, which seems to have been researched by reading random tweets, Mystal claims that our “current interpretation of the Second Amendment was invented by the National Rifle Association in the 1970s” because in “the 1960s, Republicans were all about gun control, because in the 1960s Black people thought that they should start carrying guns.”

It’s understandable that Mystal, whose father had just arrived from Haiti on a soccer scholarship in the sixties, knows nothing about American history. If you believe Mystal, the right to bear arms was something Republicans came up with in the sixties because they hated black people.

Innocent!

That final verdict came after George Cardinal Pell endured a gruelling four years of accusations, investigations, trials, public humiliations, and more than a year of imprisonment after being convicted by an Australian court of a crime he did not commit.  

Led off to jail in handcuffs, following his sentencing on March 13, 2019, the 78-year-old Australian prelate began what was meant to be six years in jail for “historical sexual assault offenses”. Cardinal Pell endured more than thirteen months in solitary confinement, before the Australian High Court voted 7-0 to overturn his original convictions. His victory over injustice was not just personal, but one for the entire Catholic Church.

Bearing no ill will toward his accusers, judges, prison workers, journalists, and those harbouring and expressing hatred for him, the cardinal used his time in prison as a kind of “extended retreat”.  He eloquently filled notebook pages with his spiritual insights, prison experiences, and personal reflections on current events both inside and outside the Church, as well as moving prayers.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/04/hail-to-the-donald/

Why was Donald Trump such a remarkably successful president, both in politics and in policy? Anyone who doubts his success in politics, or thinks he bought his way to office, need only look to the unsuccessful presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller, Ross Perot, Steve Forbes, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. And anyone who doubts his success in policy need only look to his record: tax cuts, regulatory reform, a four-year pause in illegal immigration, Arab-Israeli peace, the US-Mexico-Canada agreement, and the building of a Western consensus against China. Even his coronavirus performance was a toss-up: most of America’s excess deaths are attributable to the incompetence of Democratic governors, and Trump can rightly take credit for the push to develop vaccines in record time. About the worst that can reasonably said about President Trump is that his Tweets were impolite—and he was extraordinarily ungracious in defeat.

So how did the Donald do it? We’ve all heard lots of opinion from academics, journalists and just plain philistines, but Richard Alston in Donald Trump: The Ultimate Contrarian writes from the perspective of a practical politician and policy-maker. A former senator, cabinet minister and president of the Liberal Party, Alston writes that Trump’s

…genius was to discern what no one else understood—that the political establishment and its acolytes had gone off the rails and were much more interested in media-driven priorities … than bread-and-butter issues.

Once elected, he was then naive enough to actually keep his political promises. The result was that, through the unlikely avatar of a New York property developer, middle America took control of the White House. Commonsense (seat-of-the-pants?) politics and policies trumped the refined civilities of the professional political class. Alston calls it “democracy’s finest hour”.

Alston writes of Trump that “the seeds of his triumph and Hillary Clinton’s defeat lay in the creeping atrophy of politics … in recent decades”:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/the_real_black_swan_of_2020_the_assault_on_small_business.html

Most people believe the coronavirus was a Black Swan, an unexpected event of large magnitude with unprecedented consequences. But Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined that metaphor, disagrees. Coronaviruses were well known, though the SARS-CoV-2 strain that hit humans was new. And the pandemic wasn’t unexpected. Experts had been warning of one – though not of the coronavirus per se – for some years. In 2019, the government had even conducted months-long pandemic preparation drills. Taleb’s annoyance is at the diminution of his coinage to a cliché.

There was, however, a real Black Swan event in 2020, says Carol Roth in her book The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America. It was the U.S. government’s reaction to the pandemic – with unprecedented decisions and a lockdown that forced people to stop working and doing business for months on end. The pandemic became a pretext for a politically motivated campaign against small businesses and individuals to hasten the consolidation of power in Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Government. That is the hook and weighty claim with which Roth begins her book.

China has concentration camps now. Why do Westerners claim our sins are unique?

It is now in vogue to celebrate non-Western cultures and disparage Western ones. Some of this is a much-needed reckoning, but much of it fatally undermines the very things that created the greatest, most humane civilization in the world.

In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric. After all, if we must discard the ideas of Kant, Hume, and Mill for their opinions on race, shouldn’t we discard Marx, whose work is peppered with racial slurs and anti-Semitism? Embers of racism remain to be stamped out in America, but what about the raging racist inferno in the Middle East and Asia?

It’s not just dishonest scholars who benefit from this intellectual fraud but hostile nations and human rights abusers hoping to distract from their own ongoing villainy. Dictators who slaughter their own people are happy to jump on the “America is a racist country” bandwagon and mimic the language of antiracism and “pro-justice” movements as PR while making authoritarian conquests.

If the West is to survive, it must be defended.The War on the West is not only an incisive takedown of foolish anti-Western arguments but also a rigorous new apologetic for civilization itself.