RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/15/what-the-hell-and-worse/

A review of  “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever,” by John McWhorter (Penguin, 288 pages, $21.49).

In my freshman year of college, way back in 1971, I took a course on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama from a British-accented and British-named Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite. The course introduced me to an abundance of 16th and 17th century playwrights who were not named William Shakespeare, upon whom Professor Satterthwaite cast so intense a light that we would be blinded to other sources of illumination. So we plunged into Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, and many others. Their plays remain vivid to me even now—not that Professor Satterthwaite was an especially good teacher. He was a digressive fellow who would meet his students at home in his private study while he sucked on his pipe and told stories, many of them with a blue tinge.

He drew a key distinction between what he called the “comedy of f___ and the comedy of s___.” Or to be a little more delicate, sex comedies and potty humor. He meant all comedy is one or the other. I have never been clear whether that’s a good distinction. (Can’t a comedy indulge both? Isn’t there anything else?) But I vividly remember how Professor Satterthwaite relished saying those two words. Of course, at age 17 I had heard them plenty of times before. I attended public school in Pittsburgh neighborhoods where everyday student vocabulary had more of the blast furnace than those two words. But I never heard them rolled trippingly from the tongue of a cultivated Englishman extolling fine literature. That was new. 

The genial and even more cultivated John McWhorter recently delivered a short and somewhat alarming book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever. McWhorter teaches linguistics (and lots of other subjects, including music history) at Columbia University, but I think it safe to say he is best known as a linguist, and one who has charmed his way through 20 books and hundreds of essays. Nine Nasty Words continues his charm offensive—with emphasis on both those words. The charm he possesses is that of a relaxed and convivial conversationalist, a reincarnation or an avatar of the late Professor Alfred Wanner Satterthwaite, but without the British affectation and with a great deal more to teach. He brings his credentials as a black American to the table but not in the fraught tone of claiming special insight. Of special insights he has plenty, but they reflect scholarship not racial privilege. But his charm offense does have an offensive part, and it too is also a bit Satterthwaitian: McWhorter delights in naughty words. Or at least most of them.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/review/2022/01/donald-trump-magnificent-vulgarian/

The 2016 US election was a turning point for the republic. Having tolerated presidents Barack Obama (Democrat, 2009-17) and George W. Bush (Republican, 2001-2009), and with Hillary Clinton (Democrat) offering more of the same, large swathes of the voting American middle class were desperate for change. They wanted to see a it in the way politics was done, and to stop being ignored by their elected representatives in Washington DC.

The election was a contest between former First Lady, senator and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (a Washington insider) and a trailblazing entertainment and construction businessman from New York with a fondness for disruption, Donald J. Trump. Voters, particularly those living in the Midwest, liked what Trump was offering: making America great again. Trump promised to be their agent for change. He was catering for the needs and aspirations of ordinary Americans, who felt they had been neglected for much too long. The ‘basket of deplorables’ (Clinton’s remark showing her disrespect for millions of hard-working Middle Americans), one in two women, and one in three Hispanics voted for the ultimate risk-taker. A new dawn was emerging in the United States. Trump was to embark on a program of reform – and he was in a hurry to ‘drain the swamp’ of the Washington insiders who looked after only themselves. Trump was soon to discover how entirely different it was campaigning from opposition to governing.

Political historians warn that commentary immediately after an event will never stand as the final word. Dispassionate historical analysis, it is often said, takes time. Written works explain and clarify decisions and events that the participants expect historians to consider when assessing political, economic, social or cultural events.

The rise and fall of the Trump presidency has been the subject of much commentary, mainly by a handful of active participants including academics, commentators, journalists, and Trump family members. Little has been written by those who have some perspective on the machinations of politics and government. To date, the Trump presidency has been the subject of terse political commentary more than measured historical assessment; but commentary is not history.

Donald Trump: The Ultimate Contrarian (Connor Court Publishing, 2021) is Richard Alston’s second foray in two years examining the principles and practice of public leadership, and he offers a scintillating read. Drawing on his time in politics, as a senator and senior minister in the Howard Government, and as a state and federal party leader, Alston ventures where others fear to tread – offering a critique of Trump’s presidency. With outstanding effect.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/woke-racism-danusha-v-goska/

John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He has also published in numerous prestigious outlets, and he is currently an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. McWhorter is the son of a college administrator father and a professor mother. He attended Friends Select School, a private, a 189-year-old college-preparatory institution. In short, McWhorter is a highly accomplished member of the American elite. He is black. A man should never be reduced to a skin color. But we live in, as the apocryphal Chinese curse is alleged to say, “interesting times,” and, so, yes, every mention of McWhorter’s new book Woke Racism may skip his many accomplishments, and focus on his color.

“I know quite well,” he writes, “that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they’re written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book … A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist.” As McWhorter notes, he is accused of being “not really black.”

McWhorter responds by reminding our Woke overlords, whom he calls “The Elect,” that their very ideology insists that every black man in America is living under the oppressive boot of white supremacy. The New York Times published at least one op-ed by a black professor who insisted that being a professor is no escape from America’s pervasive racism. Chris Lebron’s June 16, 2020 op-ed was entitled, “White America Wants Me to Conform. I Won’t Do It. Even at Elite Universities, I Was Exposed to the Disease that Has Endangered Black Lives for So Long.” So, yes, as McWhorter points out, by the Elect’s own value system, he is indeed “black enough.”

McWhorter has been producing necessary prose for decades; he should be required reading for American students. His essay entitled “Explaining the Black Education Gap” in Wilson Quarterly’s summer, 2000 issue, is one of the boldest pieces about education I’ve ever read. I wish I could require every one of our Woke overlords to read McWhorter’s June 11, 2020 piece in Quillette “Racist Police Violence Reconsidered.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/nihlist-thought-dr-dooms-wife-christine-grady-lloyd-billingsley/

“This book was written by the author in her private capacity. Opinions expressed are her own. No official support or endorsement by the NINR [National Institute of Nursing Research] the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or other agencies is intended or should be inferred regarding the views presented here.”

Those are the first words a reader encounters in The Search for an AIDS Vaccine: Ethical Issues in the Development and Testing of a Preventative HIV Vaccine, by Christine Grady, from Indiana University Press back in 1995. In the acknowledgments, doubts begin to rise.

The author thanks “my mentor,” Georgetown professor Leroy Walters, along with several academics and medical doctors. Also mentioned are two officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the NIH, and Mary Ropka and others at the Clinical Therapeutics Laboratory at the NINR.

On the book’s final page, readers learn that “Christine Grady is Acting Clinical Director and Research Associate at the National Institute of Nursing Research, the National Institutes of Health,” the very agency that that supposedly offers no support or endorsement for Grady’s book, which is “dedicated to my family.”

How strange, then, that the author includes no acknowledgement for her husband, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom she married ten years earlier in 1985. Dr. Fauci shows up on page 55, his only named appearance, as the “director of NIAID,” conveniently enough, “the branch of the NIH primarily responsible for vaccine development.” His wife finds limited success in the development of vaccines against retroviral infections and sexually transmitted diseases, and acknowledges that “HIV is an STD.”

HIV is also “associated with social deviance,” but no reference to works such as How to Have Sex in an Epidemic, from 1983, or And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic, by Randy Shilts and first published in 1987. Both works outline bathhouse culture and the widespread use of amyl and butyl nitrites, also known as “poppers” and their destructive effects on health. Grady also ignores The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, first published in 1990.

Grady does recall how the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) and other activists were “taking matters into their own hands.” In July of 1990, Dr. Anthony Fauci, announced that such activists would have representation on all committees and in all activities of NIAID’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG).

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/what-role-did-the-fbi-play-in-january-6/

Just as the investigation into the “terror attack” of January 6 was in full swing in the autumn of 2021, court proceedings in the alleged 2020 plot to kidnap of Governor Gretchen Whitmer began in Michigan. 

When 13 men allegedly tied to militia groups were arrested on October 7 of this year on federal and state charges for planning to kidnap Whitmer from her Michigan vacation cottage, Team Biden and Whitmer herself made the most of the timely political gift. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” Biden said in an October 9 statement. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.”

In a press release announcing the arrest of six of the plotters on federal charges, the Justice Department detailed the elaborate plan. “This group used operational security measures, including communicating by encrypted messaging platforms. On two occasions, members of the alleged conspiracy conducted coordinated surveillance on the Governor’s vacation home . . . and discussed detonating explosive devices to divert police.” The wannabe kidnappers planned to use a taser gun on Whitmer then either abandon her in a boat on a nearby lake or transport her to Wisconsin to stand trial. “These alleged extremists undertook a plot to kidnap a sitting governor,” the assistant FBI special agent in charge said in the statement. “Whenever extremists move into the realm of actually planning violent acts, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force stands ready to identify, disrupt, and dismantle their operations, preventing them from following through on those plans.”

Investigating—or Planning—the Plot?

But the Justice Department’s description failed to match reality as court documents and testimony would show. Far from the FBI thwarting the operation, the FBI itself enlisted participants, organized and funded training and surveillance trips, and used paid informants working with FBI agents to lure unsuspecting “militia” members into attempting to execute the plot. 

The scheme centered around a group called the Wolverine Watchmen, an unknown “militia” group formed online in late 2019 by another man who faced state, not federal, charges related to the plot. (The man, Joseph Morrison, created a Facebook page for the new group four days after he was arrested on a weapons charge, which was pleaded down to a misdemeanor with time served—one day in jail.) It was essentially a small online group of malcontents, more smoke than fire.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/five_covid_books_you_must_read.html

Here are five works to stretch your mind, challenge your presuppositions, and lead to a perspective on COVID-19 that is concordant with reality.

For the last two years, we have witnessed a war on truth.  From the censorship of key medical experts to the widespread dissemination of false information concerning the efficacy of lockdowns, masking, and vaccines, societal distrust is at an all-time high.

In this post-truth age, many have fled to the highways and byways of the internet in their search for the facts.  In this pursuit, some have found legitimate information from experts, while others have been inundated with weird and wonderful ideas from questionable sources.

For this reason, I want to suggest several books that I believe stretch our minds, challenge our presuppositions, and lead us to a perspective on COVID-19 that is concordant with reality.

Based on massive new research, a compelling and surprising account of the twentieth century’s closest election

“A brilliant work. . . the research is absolutely phenomenal. . . This book should receive every accolade the publishing industry can give it, including the Pulitzer Prize.”—John Rothmann, KGO’s “The John Rothmann Show”

The 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon is one of the most frequently described political events of the twentieth century, yet the accounts to date have been remarkably unbalanced. Far more attention is given to Kennedy’s side than to Nixon’s. The imbalance began with the first book on that election, Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960—in which (as he later admitted) White deliberately cast Kennedy as the hero and Nixon as the villain—and it has been perpetuated in almost every book since then. Few historians have attempted an unbiased account of the election, and none have done the archival research that Irwin F. Gellman has done. Based on previously unused sources such as the FBI’s surveillance of JFK and the papers of Leon Jaworski, vice-presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, and many others, this book presents the first even-handed history of both the primary campaigns and the general election. The result is a fresh, engaging chronicle that shatters long‑held myths and reveals the strengths and weaknesses of both candidates.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/decoding_the_tyranny_of_the_administrative_state_.html

Purchasing Submission:  Conditions, Power, and Freedom, by Philip Hamburger, 336 pp Hardcover $35 Kindle $33.25,   ISBN-13 978-0674258235, Harvard University Press, 2021.

Professor of Law Philip Hamburger of Columbia University has been campaigning for years to measure, define and condemn the growth of a powerful administrative state in America.     

The late, great Angelo Codevilla rang the alarm about the excesses of centralized oligarchic statism and an army of unelected bureaucrats eating away at liberty for citizens under the constitution in his essay, “Scientific Pretense and Democracy,” followed on by another wellreceived  2010 essay “The Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution,” about the growth of an unelected totalitarian ruling class, whose influence and power are derived from “expertise” that allowed them to exert power over and intimidate the citizenry as the self-anointed oligarchy.  

Professor Hamburger, Friedman Professor of Constitutional Law at Columbia, caught my attention with a short monographic book, The Administrative Threat, that summarized the points of his erudite 650-page 2014 book, Is the Administrative State Unlawful?  The short book is a great summary but the long book is magisterial and explains why the political geniuses of the American Founding wrote a Constitution that intentionally hobbled the power of the executive branch and created competing branches to distribute power and prevent tyrannical grasping of power by any branch, along with a federal plan to distribute power to the states.

The Founders were well aware of the history of tyranny in England — crown edicts, Star Chamber prosecutions and other abuses that flourished in the first half of the 17th century — ending with a civil war and regicide of Charles I.  These events were fresh in their 18th century minds and they were serious students of political theory.

Hamburger wrote his two books from the maw of the liberal political establishment, Columbia University in Upper West Side Manhattan, but he obviously has his legal head on straight.  He writes about administrative state growth and abuses that had emanated from that growth of a regulatory state.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/what-do-white-americans-owe-black-people-mark-tapson/

Books on America’s racial divide – primarily from the woke, purportedly “anti-racist” left – are all the rage today, making bestselling millionaires out of race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. Generally speaking, they promote the false narrative that America’s very founding is grounded in slavery, not liberty; that Americans are racist in our very DNA, as Barack Obama once put it; and that we are still in thrall today to an irredeemably systemic racism.

Philosopher, author, and DePaul University professor Jason D. Hill, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and one of the boldest, most original thinkers on race, has written a powerful new counter-narrative titled, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression. Hill, himself of mixed-race, Jamaican descent, laments that too many blacks today are being sold an identity rooted in “resignation, nihilism, Afro-pessimism, entitlement, separatism, victimology, misanthropy, and hatred of the United States.” His book urges them to practice “radical forgiveness” and “radical individualism,” and to embrace the freedom of a “transracial future.” It is a controversial message that offers black Americans an opportunity which threatens the victim narrative of divisive exploiters like Kendi and DiAngelo.

I posed some questions to the author about his book, What Do White Americans Owe Black People?

Mark Tapson:           Dr. Hill, congratulations on a brilliant, provocative book. So many questions, so little time and space. Let me begin with a question about a subtle but significant point: Associated Press guidelines now call for capitalizing the word “black” – but not “white” – when used in a racial, ethnic, or cultural sense, purportedly to honor blacks’ shared experience and sense of identity. That capitalization swiftly become widespread practice. I noticed you didn’t use that in your book. I assume that was a conscious choice on your part?

Jason D. Hill:           Thanks for the kind words, Mark. They mean much to me. Yes: I’m orthodox when it comes to the mechanics of language. I won’t make an exception in the case of capitalizing the word “black” for the sake of sheer political expediency. Semantic exactitude trumps identity politics in this case.

MT:     You begin by asserting that, while slavery was of course an “egregious evil,” culpability for it is complex and that the argument for reparations to the descendants of slaves is “morally incoherent.” Can you elaborate on that?