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BOOKS

Smearing Capitalism by John Stossel

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2023/11/29/smearing-capitalism-n2631747

You must be lonely. The media say loneliness is everywhere in America.

A Los Angeles Times columnist says, “There’s a mass loneliness crisis going on.”

“Capitalism is Making You Lonely,” says Jacobin Magazine.

Vox claims, “Capitalism makes us feel empty inside.”

As usual, the media are just wrong.

In my new video, historian Johan Norberg points out that, “There’s no empirical data that actually shows that we feel more lonely now than we did in the past. … When researchers compare people with previous generations at the same stage of life, they don’t find evidence of increased loneliness.”

“But more people live alone now,” I say. “I would think that would make people lonelier.”

“What they never tell you in the reports,” Norberg replies, “is that people who live alone and spend less time surrounded by other people are also more happy with those relationships.”

In addition, “When people around the world are asked, ‘do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you?’ People in countries (like America) where more people live alone, usually say, ‘yes.'”

But in India and China, more people say they have no one.

“It’s the complete opposite of what people expect,” Norberg says. “In less market-based societies, 20% to 40% say they have no one to count on if they need help. In the richest and most individualist societies, it’s in the low single digits.”

On a YouTube channel with 1.7 million subscribers, a socialist says, “Material incentives of capitalists isolate us from nature, each other and ourselves.”

Norberg replies, “I understand why those charlatans get an audience, because at times we all feel lonely.”

But his new book, “The Capitalist Manifesto,” points out how capitalism makes life better, including making people less lonely.

The Greatest American Western Novel of All Elmer Kelton’s ‘The Time It Never Rained’ is an overlooked classic.Kevin Mims

https://quillette.com/2023/11/23/the-greatest-american-western-novel-of-all/

When Cormac McCarthy died in June of this year, much was written about his 1985 western novel Blood Meridian, which many literary highbrows over the years (Harold Bloom, Saul Bellow, George Steiner, etc.) have claimed is not just a great western but one of the great masterpieces in all of American literature. Likewise, when Larry McMurtry died in 2021, many of the appreciations that appeared in print made similar claims for his western novel Lonesome Dove, published exactly three months after Blood Meridian, on June 1st, 1985. But, in the opinion of many ordinary readers of western fiction, the greatest cowboy novel of them all is Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained, published 50 years ago this month, and a full 15 years before Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian.

Unlike McCarthy and McMurtry, Kelton never received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. But he won seven Spur Awards for Best Western Novel from the Western Writers of America. Four of his books won Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In 1995, the Western Writers of America voted Kelton “the greatest western writer of all time.” In 1998, he won the inaugural Lone Star Award For Lifetime Achievement from the Larry McMurtry Center for Arts and Humanities at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. And, as Houston Public Media noted in 2014, “The Time It Never Rained is now recognized as his finest work, and a lasting contribution to Texas literary history.”

Elmer Kelton was born in 1926, the son of a Texas rancher. “I grew up in a cowboy world,” Elmer once wrote. “My father, Buck Kelton, was foreman of the large McElroy Ranch, in Crane and Upton counties. He never went to the movies, and he never read western novels to find out what cowboys were supposed to be like. They had been part of his heritage since his grandfather brought a string of horses out of East Texas in 1878 and settled in Callahan County, east of Abilene.” He realised at a young age, however, that he wasn’t cut out for a cowboy’s life. His eyesight was weak and he preferred reading books to riding broncs.

Kelton enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin and was matriculated there from 1942 to 1944, and then again from 1946 to 1948, earning a BA in journalism. The two-year interruption in his education was the result of his service in the US Army near the end of World War II. After graduation, Kelton spent 15 years covering the farm-and-ranch beat for the San Angelo Standard Times. Later, he spent five years as the editor of Sheep and Goat Raiser magazine, and then 22 years as an editor at Livestock magazine, retiring in 1990. During those years, he also churned out 30 western novels. He continued writing and publishing novels right up until 2009, the year of his death. His official bibliography lists 48 novels, six story collections, and more than a dozen non-fiction books.

DECEPTION- BY RAND PAUL

Senator Rand Paul was on to Anthony Fauci from the start. Wielding previously unimaginable power, Fauci misled the country about the origins of the Covid pandemic and shut down scientific dissent.

One of the few leaders who dared to challenge “America’s Doctor” was Senator Rand Paul, himself a physician. Deception is his indictment of the catastrophic failures of the public health bureaucracy during the pandemic.

Senator Paul presents the evidence that:

The Covid virus was likely the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab in China—research funded in part by the U.S. government.
Taxpayer dollars for that research were deceptively funneled to Wuhan without the required regulatory review.
Fauci and his scientific yes-men knew from day one about Covid’s origin and tried to cover it up.
Fauci and his allies ruthlessly attacked everyone—including highly qualified scientists—who threatened to reveal the truth about the pandemic.

Why? Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants and unreported royalties were at stake, and heads would roll if the truth got out.

It almost worked. At Fauci’s insistence, the government imposed needlessly extreme lockdowns on Americans at the cost of immense personal and economic destruction.

Covid-19 was deadly, but the real killer was the coverup, led by America’s most durable medical bureaucrat—a man for whom the truth was too often expendable.

Senator Paul makes a powerful case that funding dangerous bioengineering in a totalitarian country is madness. If we don’t heed this warning, the next pandemic could be far worse.

Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life Seamus Bruner

Nationally acclaimed investigative journalist Seamus Bruner reveals how billionaires like Bill Gates, George Soros, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg plan to control every aspect of daily life—from food and energy to reproduction and your personal data.

Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs, while lab-grown meats are a rare, expensive delicacy. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip.

Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Forum get their way. Bruner, the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute led by famed investigator Peter Schweizer, presents a mountain of original research and reveals shocking new evidence that shows their sinister agenda will soon become reality.

For example, the Controligarchs are:

Funding eugenics research that will allow them to pre-determine their children’s traits, creating a new caste system in which the ultrawealthy are able to hack their own biology—augmenting their intelligence with AI—to become superhuman or, they hope, immortal
Bagging billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded crony stimulus and other forms of inflation-inducing corporate welfare that has allowed this tiny elite faction to double their net worth—adding trillions of dollars to their collective holdings—while the middle and lower classes work harder to earn less
Planning for “the next pandemic,” which means reinstating their lockdowns, implementing new waves of small business closures, and, ultimately, consolidating the ownership—of everything—into fewer and fewer hands

Bruner offers a gripping and groundbreaking look into the shadowy meetings and sweetheart deals behind global social-engineering efforts, proving that, despite their stated intentions, we must never cede control of our lives to billionaires.

Amidst daily disasters ranging from bank collapses to disease outbreaks to food and energy crises—each caused or exacerbated by the expert class—this thrilling investigation into the global elite is a must hear.

The Catholic Church Against Slavery: Setting the Record Straight By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_catholic_church_against_slavery_setting_the_record_straight.html

The Catholic Church, like many ancient institutions, has a checkered past.  Its record has been marred by the horrors of the Inquisition, its ambivalence towards the Nazis and the Holocaust, and its complicity in – and even cover-up of – child abuse by priests.  To its credit, however, the Church – despite some lapses – has a long and consistent history of opposing slavery.

That is the thesis of The Worst of Indignities: The Catholic Church on Slavery, the latest book by Paul Kengor.  A professor at Grove City College, Kengor is the bestselling author of over a dozen works, such as The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration; Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century; and Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage.

Citing scriptural depictions of Jesus healing slaves, Kengor asserts that an exemplary, forward-thinking role against slavery can be traced to the very beginnings of Christianity – as early as the first century.  Since then, the Church’s stance has been consistent.  Papal bulls and encyclicals have condemned the abominable commerce in humans, which soared during the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the 1480s through much of the 19th century. 

The stance continues to this day.  Early in the 20th century, in an encyclical called Lacrimabili Statu (Latin for in tears), Pope Pius X described slavery as “the worst of indignities,” from which the book draws its title.  Pope John Paul II, whose papacy ran from 1978 to 2005, apologized for slavery and warned against “new forms of it, often insidious.”  In the encyclical Veritatis Splendor,  he condemned slavery as “intrinsically evil,” and in a 2002 letter to Archbishop Jean-Louis Touran described human trafficking, organized prostitution, and forced labor as a “modern plague.”  The current pontiff, Pope Francis, has often condemned sex trafficking, low-paid labor, organ trade, the drugs and weapons trade, war, and organized crime.  In Fratelli Tutti, he described them as “scourges.”

The Elite Conspiracy to Monopolize Opinion Through Propaganda By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_elite_conspiracy_to_monopolize_opinion_through_propaganda.html

Humankind is supposedly ruled by reason. But logic isn’t effective in influencing people, individually or in a group. Advertising, public relations, and propaganda succeed precisely because they bypass reason. They hack the shortcuts the brain uses, changing people’s beliefs and behavior without their realizing it.

Sadly, we are not taught how to guard against these techniques, writes Michelle Stiles in One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda. This ignorance, she says, has “devastating consequences for both individuals and society as a whole.”

Some techniques are as old as civilization. Many books cover those used in advertising. Stiles’s scholarly book instead addresses how the ubiquitous manufacture of consent has eclipsed faith in the media and democracy, with stagecraft and narrative supplanting the search for truth. Like a 21st-century Orwell, she warns that tyranny begins with control and abuse of language. She aims to help us recognize the modus operandi of Idea Bullies, who use nefarious means to make an unwary public accept the dominant narrative.

Stiles begins with a startling fact. It wasn’t Nazi Germany or communist dictatorships that first mastered mass persuasion. It was the American government in the lead-up to U.S. involvement in World War I. The working and middle classes saw the war as a businessman’s venture and were reluctant to enlist. To overcome this resistance, President Woodrow Wilson set up the Committee on Public Information (CPI) headed by George Creel. Other key figures were Arthur Bullard, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann.

Together, they drew on and orchestrated the skills of intellectuals, journalists, local leaders, artists, businessmen, and others to get young men to believe in the cause and sign up to fight. Every means was deployed to sell the war to Americans and the world—the printed word, the spoken word, motion pictures, posters, and radio. ‘Four-minute men’—essentially paid shills—would give seemingly extempore speeches at public meetings, plays, and other places to push the war effort. They doubled up as snitches. Those expressing anti-war sentiments were shamed, censored, or faced legal action. In the end, Creel could boast that the committee’s work was a “vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventure in advertising.”

Sasha Ivanov.How To Defeat Woke: Rufo vs Hanania

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-to-defeat-woke-rufo-vs-hanania?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

This year saw the publication of two very important books, which are bound to shape intellectual discourse and (hopefully) public policy in coming years. Richard Hanania’s The Origins of Woke and Chris Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution are the Tech Right’s response to the woke onslaught of the past decade. The two authors made their name on Twitter/X by capitalizing on anti-woke sentiment, and each ended up influencing the American right-wing despite having no previous affiliation with the Republican party.

Both books are excellent, and should be read by anyone who wants to understand the culture war. Both authors – especially Rufo, but also Hanania through CSPI – are activists and not mere writers. They deserve credit for taking the fight to the Left and being viciously attacked while doing so.

This review will compare and contrast the two books, providing a critical appraisal of their main points – while keeping in mind that both are fundamentally on the right track. I will not describe the contents of the books in detail – for that, you can read Eric Kaufmann’s excellent review.

Culture or politics?

Juxtaposing the two books helps to answer a fundamental question: how do we change society – through political or institutional/cultural capture? Obviously, both approaches are needed; after all, the left took both approaches. But at this moment of leftist hegemony, where should the right focus its efforts? In science there is a distinction between ultimate and proximate causes; if politics is downstream of culture, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say, then efforts should be concentrated on the ultimate cause, culture. But if civil rights law is the ultimate cause of woke culture, then just changing legislation will be enough.

My own position can be summarized as follows: Rufo beats Hanania. Politics is downstream of culture, and not the other way round. Of course, the two books are more complementary than they are antagonistic, and  neither claims that wokeness is singularly caused by politics or culture. However, Rufo clearly emphasizes the causal role of culture on politics, while Hanania clearly states that political decisions ultimately shape culture.

The aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel has exposed the West’s moral collapse The protests we are seeing have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with problems here at home Douglas Murray

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/10/20/israel-palestine-hamas-london-protests-anti-semitism/

There is a good rule about anti-Semitism. One reason it isn’t better known is because its best expression comes at the mid-point of the 20th century’s towering work of historical fiction: Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman.

That novel, which takes the reader from the Battle of Stalingrad to the Nazi death camps, traverses the entire dark heart of the 20th century. Yet in the very middle of its 900 pages, the great Russian writer examines the question of anti-Semitism. He says almost everything.

Anti-Semitism is something which, as Grossman writes, can be met “in the marketplace and in the Academy, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard”. He describes it as always a means rather than an end, “a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved”.

And here is the key point. “It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.”

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have seen this. And never more than in the past fortnight.

Look at the protests against Israel that have erupted across Europe since the Hamas massacres two weeks ago today. There were no mass rallies in solidarity with the Jews who had been gunned down at a music festival, shot in the head at a bus stop, or decapitated in front of their parents.

Weirdly enough across Britain, Europe and the wider West, almost nobody had time for any such public expressions of sympathy. We did at the highest political levels. But on the streets? No.

The Jewish people of this country were effectively left alone, to try to mourn and suffer however they could. But wider sympathy of the kind we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests? Nope. Nowhere to be seen.

I happen to have been travelling across America and Europe this week, and everywhere I have been I have seen the same thing.

Mass pro-Palestinian protests in New York’s Times Square. Major protests in every European capital. In Lisbon, people waving Palestinian flags. In Norway, a protest of people showing their support for the Palestinians and their opposition to Israel.

In each place, I think the same thing. What are you doing? What has any of this got to do with you? Why are you silent about so much in the world and produce such noise on this?

There is an explanation for what, at the deepest level, is going on.

The Jews are – as Grossman says – attacked by anti-Semites whatever they do. If they are poor, they are criticised for being poor. If they are rich, they are suspected for being rich. If they are ultra-religious, they are accused of being outsiders. If they are secular, they are accused of being seditious.

‘Mao’s America’ bears a terrifying resemblance to China that took 20 million lives. I know, I lived through it China’s Cultural Revolution canceled 3,000 years of history as Mao had everything torn down — even statues By Xi Van Fleet

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/maos-america-bears-terrifying-resemblance-china-took-20-million-lives-know-lived-through

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from the new, “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning,” by Xi Van Fleet.  

The year 2020 was a watershed moment in American history. The outbreak of a pandemic brought ashore to us from the Chinese Communist Party and the death of George Floyd created the perfect storm. This storm delivered a heavy blow to America, a blow so severe that America now appears to have been possibly changed forever.

Suddenly, many Americans awakened to the realization that they hardly recognized their own country anymore. Overnight, it seemed new realities were being forced upon them, challenging everything they believed to be true.

Many awoke to find that they have become oppressors for being born White. Others found that they must now consider themselves hopelessly oppressed and incapable simply because they were born non-White. Many are bewildered that reality and common sense no longer mean anything.

During the riots in the summer of 2020, viewers were told they were watching mostly peaceful protests while buildings were burning in the background. No one now is sure how to define a woman and everyone must now believe men can have babies. Parents were dumbfounded through Zoom classes what their children are being taught in public schools — that America is an unredeemable, racist country.

 Mao’s Cultural Revolution turned his nation red with blood, with up to 20 million dead. (Getty Images)

Americans have found themselves strangers in their own country. What is happening? Why? For what purpose?

But wait… I have seen all of this before.

Like most Americans, I also felt like I was hit by a storm. Unlike most Americans, this storm hit me once before, more than 50 years ago, when I was only 7 years old, just starting school in China.

The storm was Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). It lasted 10 years, covering most of my school years.

Government Gangsters: How the Deep State Imperils National Security By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/government_gangsters_how_the_deep_state_imperils_national_security.html

Like most Americans, Kash Patel grew up believing that the country was run as a democracy, with a government that honors the will of the people and is accountable to them. 

It was only much later, as an attorney and then as a senior advisor to former president Donald Trump, that he encountered – and confronted – what has come to be called the Deep State, people at the highest levels of government, business, and culture who subvert democracy to serve their own ends.

In his recent book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, The Truth and the Battle for our Democracy, Patel describes the Deep State in broad terms as the politicization of core American institutions and the federal government.  More specifically, this oligarchy includes elected leaders, journalists, business leaders, and NGOs with leftist ideologies.  But its most entrenched and active arm comprises “members of the unelected federal bureaucracy who think they have the right to rule America, not Congress or the president.”

Courtesy Post Hill Press

The agents of the Deep State operate through a series of networks, violating their oaths of office, weaponizing the law, and spreading disinformation for political or personal gain at the expense of equal justice and national security.  He saw them in operation as the lead investigator of the Russiagate hoax. His book is not just the story of how he battled the leviathan, but also about how the Deep State can be defeated for good.

Patel knows from where he speaks.  In his 14 years as public defender and federal prosecutor, and later as a key Trump aide, he has had ample opportunity to trace the insidious machinations of the Deep State within the Department of Justice (DoJ), the FBI, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the Department of Defense (DoD), the National Security Council (NSC), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  He has been inside the belly of the beast.