RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/interview-christopher-leonard-author

There’s an illuminating scene in Christopher Leonard’s The Lords of Easy Money that talks about the difficulty of trying to communicate the intricacies of Fed policy to mass audiences. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a trusted voice of the Tea Party movement and therefore someone who would have been expected to take an interest in the Fed’s plans for a massive intervention in the economy via the quantitative easing program, took on the subject in a free-flowing broadcast. Leonard describes what ensued:

Beck scrawled a long numeral on a chalkboard: 600,000,000,000. This represented the value of bonds the Fed just announced it would buy. “This is what they call quantitative easing,” Beck said. Then he walked to a new chalkboard with a confusing flowchart written across it that included a series of large, cartoonish arrows that seemed to signify the flow of money, or influence, or something like that, behind the Fed’s new program. Confusingly, the whole thing began with organized labor, depicted by a union boss wearing a bowler’s cap and with a cigar dangling from his mouth. It got weirder and increasingly inaccurate from there. The final cartoon on the flowchart showed a group of top-hat-wearing bankers…

Leonard described Beck’s understanding of the Fed as “like that of a very high drug user who had sat in a motel room, trying to eavesdrop through the wall while people talked about central banking.” I remember the broadcast – though I wasn’t a fan of Beck’s and occasionally wondered if his chalkboard theories about Obama as both Hitler and Stalin were really a brilliant parody I was too thick to grasp, I thought he was at least trying to say something critical about a truly dangerous Fed policy.

As Leonard notes, Beck got one important thing right, that the flood of cheap money punished ordinary savers, but the rest his presentation was so far-out, and over-focused on the idea that QE risked Weimar-style hyperinflation, that his audience probably ended up with a net minus from a knowledge perspective.

This was too bad, because the media treatments on the other, more “respectable” side, at 60 Minutes, CNBC, CNN, and the like, were either completely credulous in repeating the assertions of Fed officials that its policies were needed to “jumpstart the sluggish economy” or, if they were critical at all, focused only on the narrow question of price inflation. The much more serious question of the impact of Fed policies on asset prices simply didn’t fit well in our increasingly bifurcated media landscape, which didn’t know whether to identify the concerns of a figure like Leonard’s main character Thomas Hoenig as conservative or liberal complaints. In fact, Hoenig’s worries were about inherent institutional weaknesses that concerned both left and right demographics, making his story a tough sell to either media “side.” In this sense, a book like The Lords of Easy Money is a gift to media audiences that rarely get a clear look at a confounding topic.

https://www.spiked-online.com/books/

Woke has conquered the West. Identity politics, cancel culture and trans ideology reign. Censorship and public shaming are the price you pay for dissent. How did this once fringe ideology manage to take over our institutions? And how can ordinary people fight back? These are the questions at the heart of How Woke Won, the new book by author and spiked columnist Joanna Williams. She argues that we have much more in common than the woke would have us believe – and that it is time for us to come together to forge a freer, more democratic and truly egalitarian future.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/u-s-schools-get-bad-marx/

My father was a liberal Democrat. He worshiped FDR and didn’t care much for the GOP. His parents were staunch Republicans, and the political discussions I remember from the 1950s were always entertaining—if not a bit confusing—to this eight-year-old. Importantly, while my dad was a liberal, he was a virulent anti-Communist, and saw them as just as evil as the Nazis he went to war to eradicate.

The reasons my father hated the Communists are neatly spelled out in The Naked Communist, a book written in 1958 by political theorist W. Cleon Skousen, who eerily predicted our current state of affairs. In a section titled “Current Communist Goals,” he elucidates the plan in 45 steps, explaining that “many loyal Americans are working for these same objectives because they are not aware that these objectives are designed to destroy us.”

Skousen is especially insightful on the cultural and educational strife we are now experiencing. For example, in Step 20, he writes, “Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policy-making positions.”

While there certainly is a conservative media, is there any doubt that the predominant mainstream media runs far-left? A good example of press manipulation was the ongoing reference to the George Floyd riots—in reality, mass violence and 164 structure fires from arson in a four-day period in 2020—as “protests.” Another was the complete suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which may very well have altered the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Step 24: “Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them ‘censorship’ and a violation of free speech and free press.” In a similar vein, Step 25 reads, “Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.”

Compared to what we have now in films, TV, and music, Playboy and the ravings of Lenny Bruce in the 1950s seem Church-worthy.

In Step 30, Skousen foresaw the current mania to deny the greatness of George Washington and other iconic Americans who don’t toe the utopian party line.“Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the ‘common man.’”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/bullies-woke-mark-tapson/

Totalitarian Cancel Culture, the bullying trans lobby, and the race-mongering indoctrination of Critical Race Theorists, among other leftist assaults on society, have turned daily life into everyday battlefields for normal Americans who stand in the way of Progressive social engineering.

To address this ubiquitous, corrosive phenomenon, Canadian author Diane Bederman has written Bullies of Woke and Their Assault on Mental Health just published by New English Review Press. Ms. Bederman is also the author of Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, and The #IslamophobiaIndustry: The Insidious Infiltration of Islam into the West, all of which I have either reviewed or interviewed her about (see links) for FrontPage Mag.

Bullies of Woke documents the serious damage that bellicose leftist activists are wreaking upon the mental health of our children, who are subjected in schools and in the culture at large to unrelenting pressure to conform to, if not actually celebrate, woke ideology. In many cases our children are literally being bullied to death – committing suicide because they are unable to handle the aggressive bullying from the fanatical proponents of Progressive-driven movements such as Critical Race Theory, transgenderism, and Cancel Culture. Bullies of Woke is simultaneously a guidebook to the modern woke movement and a call to action for the silent majority to push back and restore common sense and bedrock Judeo-Christian values in our homes, our schools, and our nations in the West.

I asked Ms. Bederman some questions about her new book.

Mark Tapson:           Diane, your book covers a lot of ground and many questions come to mind, but let me just begin by asking what inspired you to view the left’s ideological assaults of Cancel Culture, Critical Race Theory, and the like through the lens of its impact on the West’s mental health?

Diane Bederman:   Mark, as much as I would like to take credit for this idea, a friend and I were talking about our world today, and we went from discussing the bullying by Progressives to mental illness. I had previously written about bullying and mental illness on my blog. And so it began.

Millard’s book is wonderful reading about the Spekes/Burton search for the source of the Nile. Burton is described as a swashbuckling, romantic hero, but he had a vicious side not documented in Millard’s book…..rsk

https://www.haaretz.com/2008-12-11/ty-article/musings-the-other-richard-burton/0000017f-dc0b-df9c-a17f-fe1bf0cd0000

“However, the manuscript with the most inflammatory content, a brand which, as it were, was a brand plucked from the flame, has been preserved to this day. It is entitled “Human Sacrifice among the Sephardine (sic) or Eastern Jews.” In it, Burton, one of the most educated men of his time, had given credence to that most ignorant of medieval prejudices: the blood libel. How he came to this is a story on its own. The Damascus Affair, about which he wrote, occurred in 1840. A Capuchin friar disappeared with his servant, never to be seen again. With the help of the fiercely anti-Semitic French consul, 13 Jews were arrested and confessed under torture to sacrificing the friar for religious purposes. The cause of the Jewish victims was taken up by the great and the good, and they were released and vindicated. By the time Burton wrote his inflammatory pamphlet, the Damascus Affair was history.”

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) was one of the most intriguing of all Victorian adventurers. A truly extraordinary character, he was a spy, scholar, linguist, explorer, religious fanatic and pornographer. He was said to have learned 25 languages and 40 dialects. Burton spent much of his life as a soldier in India. With his excellent Hindustani, Persian, Gujarati, Urdu and Arabic, it was natural that he should be an active player in what became known as the “Great Game” – the espionage activity on the northwestern frontier of India popularized by Kipling in his novel “Kim.” To misquote the title of the old BBC adventure serial, he could well be described as “Dick Burton, special agent.”

https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/faulty-towers-education-will-bunch/

One of the few issues about which the American left and right agree is that higher education is, as Orwell would say, in a bad way. But even in that source of agreement lurk countless points of dispute, regarding the sources of dysfunction (corporate greed, grade inflation, libezoomers?) and possible solutions (ending tenure, forgiving debt, creating safe spaces?).

In After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics — and How to Fix It, Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, argues that the cause of the higher-education crisis is conceptual: we see higher education as a personal privilege rather than a public good, something to be earned rather than a right that is owed. Bunch sees a straight line connecting the increase in college tuition and student debt to America’s growing social, cultural and political divisions.

To make his case, Bunch interviews people from various demographics (almost all from his home state of Pennsylvania) as illustrations of the different ways higher education — or its lack — affects everyday Americans. He also provides a history of American higher education from the end of World War Two to the present day. This history begins with the idealism of the G.I. Bill and President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education in the 1940s, both of which expressed optimism about the role of college in strengthening American democracy. But in the 1960s, students realized the flaws in this democracy — the ways that America fell short of its ideals — and pro- tested accordingly.

World War I  began on 28 July 1914 and ended on 11 November 1918. One of the best books about this epic event was written by Barbara Tuchman. I am reading it again and her narrative, her elegant prose and her stirring depictions stand the rigorous tests of time…..rsk

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek
 
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time

In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world. Beginning with the funeral of Edward VII, Tuchman traces each step that led to the inevitable clash. And inevitable it was, with all sides plotting their war for a generation. Dizzyingly comprehensive and spectacularly portrayed with her famous talent for evoking the characters of the war’s key players, Tuchman’s magnum opus is a classic for the ages.

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mangual-criminal-injustice

In his impassioned-yet-measured first book, Rafael A. Mangual offers an incisive critique of America’s increasingly radical criminal justice reform movement, and makes a convincing case against the pursuit of “justice” through mass-decarceration and depolicing.

After a summer of violent protests in 2020—sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks—a dangerously false narrative gained mainstream acceptance: Criminal justice in the United States is overly punitive and racially oppressive. But, the harshest and loudest condemnations of incarceration, policing, and prosecution are often shallow and at odds with the available data. And the significant harms caused by this false narrative are borne by those who can least afford them: black and brown people who are disproportionally the victims of serious crimes.

In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual offers a more balanced understanding of American criminal justice, and cautions against discarding traditional crime control measures. A powerful combination of research, data-driven policy journalism, and the author’s lived experiences, this book explains what many reform advocates get wrong, and illustrates how the misguided commitment to leniency places America’s most vulnerable communities at risk.

The stakes of this moment are incredibly high. Ongoing debates over criminal justice reform have the potential to transform our society for a generation—for better or for worse. Grappling with the data—and the sometimes harsh realities they reflect—is the surest way to minimize the all-too-common injustices plaguing neighborhoods that can least afford them.