RUTHFULLY YOURS

From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration

“Explosive.” —The New York Times

“[The] most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline.” — The Atlantic

“Superbly reported . . . Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids.” — Los Angeles Times

“The book Biden allies fear the most.” — Politico

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading.

https://tomklingenstein.com/radical-evil-and-the-totalitarian-temptation/

Every time conservatives win elections and begin to govern effectively, or simply push back against authoritarian manifestations of wokeness, the loudest voices on the Left evoke the specter of fascism. One side effect of this is that books like George Orwell’s 1984 or Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism momentarily become best sellers again. It is simply assumed that both authors took aim at “fascism” broadly define and never saw any enemies on the Left. These subtle books, which belong to neither the Left nor the Right but to the larger cause of liberty and human dignity, are thus instrumentalized for authoritarian “anti-fascist” purposes. 

In no way is this a new phenomenon. Walter Cronkite, the longtime CBS news anchor and “the most trusted man in America” in a bygone age, wrote an introduction to an earlier edition of 1984 in which he suggested that the totalitarian nightmare sketched in that powerful and profound book eerily anticipated…Richard Nixon and Watergate. Last year, Anne Applebaum, who once wrote with erudition and gusto about the crimes of Communism, penned an introduction to a new paperback edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she did not mention Communism once and identified Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule in Russia with full-scale totalitarianism. Examples of the systematic abuse of these anti-totalitarian classics could be multiplied. 

However, Arendt herself was a political thinker very difficult to pigeonhole. She was a German Jew who despised National Socialism, yet she defended her teacher (and sometime lover) Martin Heidegger against the charge that his apologetics for the same had discredited him philosophically. She worked indefatigably to aid Jewish refugees and displaced persons both before and after the Second World War, yet she was far from a wholehearted Zionist. She honorably resisted the totalitarian temptation in its Communist form, but had an unreasonable distrust of ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers who had borne heroic witness to Communism’s crimes. 

Arendt was hardly a conservative, but she had no interest in the kind of shallow liberalism that places naïve confidence in an ideology of Progress; in fact, she compellingly argued that “Progress” and “Doom” were two sides of the same pernicious coin.

The first investigation into why a ring of senior Washington officials went rogue to derail the election and the presidency of Donald Trump. There was nothing normal about the 2016 presidential election, not when senior U.S. officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government—designed to stop terrorist attacks—against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic. The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from “politics as usual” to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election? Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more. Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America’s first “America First” and most anti-Communist president. If we just give it a pull, the “red thread” is very long and very deep.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/at-home-with-the-holocaust/

On March 11, 2025, Rutgers University Press released At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives by Lucas F. W. Wilson, PhD. At Home is 188 pages long, inclusive of an index, end notes, and a bibliography. The book’s goal is to analyze how children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are traumatized by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. The book focuses on how homes – that is, houses and geographic locations – can transmit trauma from one generation to the next.

In an online biography, author Wilson says, “I am the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Calgary.” On a University of Calgary page, Wilson follows his name with “Pronouns: he/him/his.” In an interview, Wilson says, “My work has largely centered on the Holocaust, but given the rise in anti-queer and anti-trans violence, public policy, and legislation, I redirected my attention on a main catalyst of homophobia and transphobia today: white Christian nationalism …  Both the Holocaust and conversion therapy are inextricably connected to Christianity … The Christian scriptures and Christian theology laid the seedbed for the Holocaust … Christianity has so easily lent itself to such hatred.” Christians have “genocidal intentions” toward GLBT people, Jews, and “Indigenous folks in North America.”

Wilson, though young, is an exceptionally successful scholar, enjoying a degree of financial support and accolades that most scholars can only dream of. “I have received several fellowships and awards for my work.” An incomplete list of his honors: The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi’s Dissertation Fellowship; a European Holocaust Research Infrastructure Fellowship; The Rabbi Ferdinand Isserman Memorial Fellowship from the American Jewish Archives; a Regent Scholarship, two Edwin L. Stockton, Jr., Graduate Scholarships from Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society, an Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, and a Zaglembier Society Scholarship awarded by The Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

At Home with the Holocaust has received high praise. Scholar and author Victoria Aarons says that the book “makes a vital contribution to the research on second and third-generation Holocaust descendants with the Holocaust meets the needs of a reader happily immersed and unquestioningly invested in academic trends in writing styles, thought processes, ideology, and ethics. I am not that reader. This book exemplifies serious problems in contemporary academia, as I will detail in the review, below. First, a word on why I care about this topic.

As soon as I saw the Rutgers University Press ad for this new book, I was eager to read it. I have been swimming in the water of post-World-War-Two trauma for my entire life. I’m a baby boomer, a drop in the post-World-War-II demographic surge. I didn’t give it much thought in my childhood, but I was surrounded by post-war trauma.

This is the untold story of the rediscovery of the ancient City of David in Jerusalem and the powerful evidence that proves the Jewish people’s historical and indigenous connection to the Holy Land.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Jewish people have faced nine wars against multiple enemies. Yet, beyond the physical conflicts, a deeper ideological battle has been waged against Israel and the Jewish people. This war, crafted by certain Arab leaders and echoed by international organizations like the United Nations, seeks to erase the Jewish people’s ancestral ties to the land, casting them as outsiders, imposters, and “settlers.”

One thing, however, stands in the way of the denialists: the 3,800-year history of the City of David, a site lying just south of the Old City. Archeologists at the site are unearthing evidence that proves the Jewish people’s origin story in the land for over three millennia. Every shovel of dirt reveals that while others may claim to be indigenous to Jerusalem, the Jewish people are, in fact, more indigenous to the Land of Israel than perhaps any other group living anywhere in the world.

This is the timely story of those who transformed City of David from a neglected hilltop village into one of the most important archeological heritage sites in the world, while facing powerful global institutions and terror groups that would do almost anything to keep this truth hidden. Highly relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this book foreshadows the events and historical denialism that unfolded with Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

A revelatory investigation into the rise and fall of the ‘woke’ movement and how we can prevent it from happening again.

It is no secret that we are in the midst of a cultural revolution. Activists in the ‘woke’ movement have claimed to be on the right side of history, and yet their approach has been intolerant, intemperate and, above all, illiberal. Having dominated the western world for the past fifteen years, there are clear signs the woke are now losing their power. The re-election of Donald Trump, the scaling back of DEI initiatives, and a growing awareness of the threats to women’s sex-based rights has stirred a counter-revolution. But is this truly the end of woke? Or have the culture wars merely evolved?

In The End of Woke, Doyle skilfully examines the mechanisms underlying the zealous extremes on both the left and the right. He shows that, in a desperate power struggle to re-assert liberal values, some leaders of the anti-woke movement have found themselves adopting a different kind of authoritarian approach – one which also promotes censorship and erodes our freedoms.

Doyle argues that although authoritarianism is common to all political tribes, we must resist its pernicious influence wherever it emerges. After all, replacing one form of tyranny with another will not end the culture wars. But liberalism – true liberalism – might just see the end of woke for good.

Amid the ashes of World War I, a penniless Sender Leib Brilliant and his wife, Anna, moved their young family from Kalisz, Poland, to a new beginning in Berlin. With time and hard work, he achieved great financial success in his adopted city. Life was good–until the looming specter of fascism cast a dark shadow on their future and prompted an agonizing choice: remain in Germany and trust that their status and resources would see them through, or follow Sender Lieb’s brother, Joseph, into an uncertain future in America.

A Brilliant Decision is the poignant and inspiring true story of Sender Lieb’s journey after his and Anna’s fateful- and ultimately lifesaving- resolution to migrate with their family from Germany to New York City. Tragically, several close relatives who had remained in Europe were not as fortunate when Hitler’s Third Reich marched across the continent, leaving horror and devastation in its wake. Sender Leib’s courageous choice in 1934 echoes through the lives of his descendants, who owe everything to that one Brilliant Decision.