Friday Must-Reads

 

Time for another dose of Friday Must-Reads, articles which caught my attention this week. As always with these Must-Reads, I generally approve of the arguments but not necessarily with every idea or sentence.

"Hurtling Toward Totalitarianism" by Julian Christopher at New Discourses

 "2020: The Year in European Islam" by my friend Bruce Bawer at FrontPage Magazine

"Cancel Cult Comes for Homer" by Rod Dreher at American Conservative, and in a related piece, "Stupiditas Omnia Vincit" by Christopher Coulombe at Crisis Magazine

Also by Dreher: "West Point & Critical Race Theory," about the cheating scandal there.

"2020: The Year We Lost Our Common Sense, Courage, and Civil Liberties" by Robert Bridge at the Strategic Culture Foundation

"What to Worship, How to Obey: The New Rules of Cancel Culture" by Peter Wood at the new Deep Dives Into Critical Issues blog run by my friend, documentary filmmaker Gloria Greenfield

"When Being Woke Becomes Criminal -- and Deadly" by my friend Andrea at her must-follow Bookworm Room blog

"Make America Beautiful Again" by Francis Lee at Crisis Magazine

And a belated Christmas reflection by George Weigel at First Things, "What the Magi Teach Us."

Friday Must-Reads

 Welcome back to another edition of Friday Must-Reads:

"Where Did the New Mad Left Come From?" - Victor Davis Hanson

"The Origins of Sexual Totalitarianism" - Carlo Lancellotti at First Things

"Old White Lives Don't Matter" - Rod Dreher at The American Conservative

"Peter Navarro vs. the Slavery of Lies" - Auguste Meyrat at Crisis Magazine

 "The Real Stakes of the War on Christmas" from my brilliant friend Bruce Thornton at FrontPage Magazine

"The University as the Woke Mission Field: A Dissident Women’s Studies Ph.D. Speaks Out" - Samantha Jones at New Discourses

Friday Must-Reads

 

On a couple of occasions in the past I made tentative attempts to post a weekly handful of articles I highly recommend about aspects of culture, politics, and history that personally appeal to me, but I didn't stick with it. I've decided to give it another go, starting with the links below, which are in no particular order:

 

Prayer, Beauty, and Civilization - from The Imaginative Conservative

The 'Dictatorship of Relativism' Has Arrived - from Crisis Magazine

Mask Mandates Are a Means of Social Control Through Social Isolation - from Stella Morabito. Everything Ms. Morabito writes is a must-read.

Are the Democrats Waking the Sleeping Giant? - from The Bookworm Room. My friend Andrea is one of the most thoughtful, interesting political bloggers you'll ever come across, so I recommend reading her at The Bookworm Room regularly.

The Tragedy of Transhood - from First Things

The Coming Tsunami of Hate Speech Legislation - from Crisis Magazine

The Scars of 2020 - from American Greatness. Anything by Victor Davis Hanson, of course, is brilliant and enlightening.

Check back for more next Friday. 

The War on 'Manly Men'

Amid all the election mayhem and politicized coronavirus hysteria of the past several months, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the cultural realm, not the political arena, is where the deeper threat to our freedoms and civilization lies, because the culture is where hearts and minds are won or lost. The Left has always known this, but the Right tends to obsess over the political and scorn the cultural as trivial and unserious. If we never grasp how critical it is to engage the Left on that front, we will lose the Long Game. Let’s look at a couple of recent examples of one aspect of the Marxist assault on our culture in which the Left is gaining ground – their agenda to subvert our traditional norms of masculinity.

After what was widely touted in the media as a “history-making” appearance, Vanderbilt University female soccer player-turned-football kicker Sarah Fuller was recently named Special Teams Player of the Week by the Southeastern college football conference (SEC), along with Florida University player Kadarius Toney.

What did Fuller do to earn this honor? She “[t]ook the opening kickoff of the second half against the Tigers, as her perfectly-executed kick sailed 30 yards and was downed at the Missouri 35-yard line,” the SEC crowed in explanation.

That’s it. She was on the field for one play – not for a high-pressure, game-clinching field goal, but for a low, line drive of a kickoff that “sailed” a mere 30 yards. In all fairness, this kick was intended to be short in order to prevent a runback, but apparently, as a soccer goalie, longer kicks aren’t her strong suit: “[The short kickoff] was designed for her because that’s what she’s used to striking,” the head coach later tried to explain to reporters. And “perfectly-executed”? Perfectly-executed is the standard, not the exception, with kickoffs. One perfectly-executed kickoff is not an award-winning achievement – unless the kicker is a woman.

What would have happened if Vanderbilt’s opponents had returned the kick? “Football is not a contact sport,” the late Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty is credited with quipping. “It is a collision sport.” At 6’2”, Fuller isn’t petite (it’s unclear what her weight is; she is the only player on the Vanderbilt roster whose weight is not listed), but it’s a fair bet that if one of the male Missouri blockers hurtling downfield at full speed after Fuller’s kickoff had targeted her, or if she had tried to tackle the ball carrier, the question of whether women can compete on a truly equal footing with men in a collision sport would have been settled in one single collision. To avoid that very possibility, Fuller jogged to the sidelines immediately after her kick.

Thought Criminal

The most compelling science fiction is that in which the core of the story is not the threat of hostile aliens or Death Stars, but the dangers posed by our own humanity. Think of the tales of Philip K. Dick, for example, or those of Theodore Sturgeon, or of course, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Such is the case with the just-released new novel Thought Criminal by author Michael Rectenwald, former New York University professor-turned-champion for academic freedom, and an expert on the intellectual history of the social justice movement.

In January of 2018 I interviewed Rectenwald for FrontPage Mag here about being outed as “the Deplorable Prof,” the man behind an anonymous Twitter account which he used to criticize the social justice ideology of his (at the time) fellow leftist academics. Rectenwald went on to publish a book about the shunning and harassment directed at him by his colleagues and the NYU administration, titled Springtime for Snowflakes: Social Justice and its Postmodern Parentage from New English Review Press, which also published his subsequent books, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom and Beyond Woke. All are must-reads for understanding the totalitarian ideological currents of today’s Cancel Culture.

Rectenwald’s new novel is set in a near-future dystopia where personal robots keep constant surveillance and report any conversations or actions that reflect dissident thinking; where Smart Cities track your every move; where a massive, centralized database known as Collective Mind “has outmoded traditional higher education and made knowledge acquisition a matter of instant package downloads.” The Collective Mind also threatens to regulate all thinking and obliterate individual identity.

Not simply “a system of control imposed by an independent entity,” Collective Mind is a system that is “only possible when a collective became complicit in its own subjection and when the subjects imposed subjugation upon each other.” Think on this in the context of the current state of America today, in which a disturbing number of the population eagerly complies with useless, authoritarian mask mandates, and angrily shames those who do not comply.

As Thought Criminal opens, Cayce Varin, 48, has lost his prestigious position as professor of the Theory of Mind and AI-Neuroscience at Transhuman University in Santa Cruz, Region of California, over an affair with a graduate assistant. This very human transgression has also earned him a registration as a Thought Deviationist and Vaccine Resistor, and thus he is hauled in by robot law enforcement agents to the Essential Data complex, which houses the most important processors of Collective Mind.

Unmasking Antifa

The other day on Facebook a friend posted something critical of the domestic terror group known as Antifa, and someone came to its defense by echoing Clueless Joe Biden’s recent, bizarre declaration that Antifa is not an organization but “an idea.”

It is true that Antifa is not an organization in the strict sense, but Biden’s vague description is either stunningly uninformed or a weak attempt to deflect criticism from its masked militant members. I’m betting on the latter, because Democrat leaders have been curiously reluctant to condemn Antifa’s strategy of violence and intimidation toward the purportedly “fascist” supporters of President Trump.

To educate the Facebook commenter and Biden supporter who believes Antifa actually opposes fascism, I recommended the new book Unmasking Antifa: Five Perspectives on a Growing Threat, edited by the Center for Security Policy and featuring FrontPage Mag contributor Matthew Vadum, because there is no better dissection of the origins, nature, tactics, and aims of this anarchic “idea” and its dangerous adherents than this compact exposé.

As the subtitle suggests, Unmasking Antifa consists of five essays from a variety of experts about the movement that the book’s editor Kyle Shideler calls “a growing threat to the fabric of the American way of life and the inalienable rights of all citizens enshrined in our Constitution.”

First up is Shideler himself, whose testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on the Constitution lays out Antifa’s history and ideology, organization and structure, and network of material support before answering the question, is Antifa a terrorist organization? Shideler concludes that it most certainly is, that “Antifa’s violent attacks against demonstrators, political rally participants, and journalists with the explicit purpose of intimidating and coercing them are clearly terrorism.” He states that the movement’s single-minded purpose is to use violence to “terrorize the general public into silence and inaction” politically. As former professor Mark Bray writes approvingly in Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, “We may not always be able to change someone’s beliefs, but we sure as hell can make it politically, socially, economically, and sometimes physically costly to articulate them.”

The Disunited States of America

Now that the Democratic Party and its media enablers have unilaterally and pre-emptively declared their empty-suit candidate Joe Biden to be the President-elect, and are eager to move forward with their fundamental transformation of the United States, the obligatory calls for unity have begun.

Biden himself presumed to deliver an election “victory” speech in which he made a plea so hypocritical that it would be comical if it weren’t so outrageous. “Now let’s give each other a chance,” he stated. “It's time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature.” Maybe that means he will stop referring to Trump supporters as “chumps” and will denounce Antifa violence against them as more than just “an idea.”

Biden went on to unintentionally acknowledge that his supporters have spent the last four years smearing us as fascist, violent, white supremacist deplorables: “And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies,” he urged. “They are not our enemies. They're Americans.” This statement would seem much more sincere and meaningful if he had declared it at some point in all the time that conservatives were being harassed in public spaces and assaulted in the streets in the lead-up to the election.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama, too, took to Twitter recently to urge Democrats to reach out to Trump voters. This is how she phrased it: “Let’s remember that tens of millions of people voted for the status quo, even when it meant supporting lies, hate, chaos, and division. We’ve got a lot of work to do to reach out to these folks in the years ahead and connect with them on what unites us.” Even when calling for reconciliation the left demonizes conservatives as hate-mongers on the wrong side of history who need re-education camps to get their heads straight.

(To clarify: I use the terms “Democrats” and “the left” interchangeably, because the Democratic Party is not “liberal”; it is controlled by totalitarian radicals like the young members of “the Squad” in the House of Representatives. Conservatives are the classical liberals now. The only “liberals” remaining among the Democrats are waking up and #WalkingAway from their own Party’s illiberal radicalism.)

Why History Matters

“The teaching of history is continuing to be transformed into indoctrination by illiberal, leftist propaganda,” writes historian Bruce Thornton in his new booklet Why History Matters from the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The result, he notes, is that “the abandonment of belief in objective historical truth makes possible a politicized history that legitimizes tyrannical power.” George Orwell dramatized this in his novel 1984, a fictional scenario that, Thornton warns, “has traveled a long way to becoming fact” in America today.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Fellow at the Freedom Center and professor of Classics and Humanities at California State University in Fresno. He is also the author of nine wide-ranging histories on classical culture and its influence on Western civilization, including The Wages of Appeasement and Democracy’s Dangers & Discontents.

Covering more ground in forty pages than some books do in several times that number, Why History Matters reaches back to the origins of historiography in Herodotus and Thucydides, and brings the reader forward to the current, dangerous trend of ideological history found in Howard Zinn’s ubiquitous, subversive work A People’s History of the United States and, more recently, The New York Times’ discredited but influential “1619 Project,” which falsely posits that America was founded “to ensure slavery would continue.” This sort of historiography “that villainizes our country,” Thornton argues, is a suicidal fashion that “insidiously erodes” our love of country, emboldening our enemies “to see us as weak and primed for a fall.”  

Bruce Thornton’s Why History Matters is a must-read for understanding how modernity has eroded our grounding in “the tragic truth about human nature,” and why we need a common history that gives us a context for understanding ourselves. “Without that perspective,” he writes, “the past becomes a Cubist painting, everything flattened on the canvas of the present… and judged in terms of present ideologies and political aims and interests.”

Don’t miss it. Get your copy of Why History Matters here.

From FrontPage Mag, 11/22/20

The Left Goes Full-Fascist With an Enemies List

Even as last week’s election results are being contested and the Democrats’ massive voter fraud is being exposed, the supporters of empty-suit candidate Joe Biden are already claiming victory and chafing at the bit to implement their radical agenda. And in contrast to his hypocritical call to “put away the harsh rhetoric” and unify Americans after the purported divisiveness of Donald Trump, Biden’s supporters have already begun threatening their political opponents with vicious retribution for supporting their #MAGA nemesis.

True to their totalitarian nature, newly-reelected New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other high-profile Democrats tweeted Friday that Trump supporters essentially should be blacklisted for their role in advancing his unacceptable agenda to make America great again. “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” the socialist Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”

“Lol at the ‘party of personal responsibility’ being upset at the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years,” she added later. It takes enormous chutzpah to accuse Republicans of misbehavior in our current, thuggish “cancel culture” marked by rampant leftist violence.

“Complicity” is a loaded word, which she no doubt chose intentionally. It means participation in criminal or wrongful activity. The implication, of course, is that both President Trump and his supporters are not simply political opponents but are legally guilty of wrongdoing and must be punished.

In a democratic political system, one party “punishes” the other by beating it in elections. Losing the election – being denied the opportunity to implement your agenda – is the punishment. The opposing parties then move forward together in an often uneasy or even contentious coexistence until the next election. But totalitarians by definition reject coexistence; after seizing power they punish their opponents literally and brutally, out of pure vindictiveness and with the intent to eradicate any opposition once and for all.

ObamaGate: the Movie

As the Democrat Party moves from one duplicitous, often illegal anti-Trump operation to another without pause (such as presidential impeachment and massive, nationwide voter fraud), their earlier scandals – even recent ones – get pushed into the background of our memory. As an example: the Deep State sabotage of the 2016 Trump campaign and presidency known as “ObamaGate,” which President Trump described as “the biggest political crime in American history, by far.” Charles Lipson at Real Clear Politics wrote that ObamaGate’s abuses of power “represent some of the gravest violations of constitutional norms and legal protections in American history… The entrenched elites behind these scandals are the Swamp at its most sulfurous. They spied illegally on Americans and used powerful tools of government to damage the party-out-of-power, its outsider candidate, and then his new presidency.”

This would be great fodder for a gripping Hollywood drama – except that Hollywood doesn’t dramatize Democrat abuses of power. So it fell to conservative filmmakers, award-winning journalists, and bestselling authors Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer to capture the essence of the scandal on film for posterity.

Co-produced by the Unreported Story Society and Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch, ObamaGate: The Movie, available to watch for free here on YouTube, exposes the Deep State plot to subvert the Trump candidacy and presidency, and lays bare the lies behind the Russian collusion hoax relentlessly perpetuated by the Democrats and their abettors in the mainstream news media. Filmed in Los Angeles on the Comedy Central stage at the Hudson Theater, it stars openly-conservative actor Dean Cain, best-known as TV’s Superman, and Kristy Swanson, star of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, as “FBI lovebird” agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. It also features familiar face John James from the Dynasty TV series as Obama administration FBI Director James Comey.

McElhinney and McAleer founded The Unreported Story Society in 2017 “with a mission to tell the stories that the mainstream media ignores through art and modern media,” as the website states. The Unreported Story Society has created successful plays like FBI Lovebirds: Undercovers and has produced several podcasts such as The Ann & Phelim Scoop. McElhinney and McAleer are best known for their films Fracknation and Gosnell, which I reviewed here, based on their compelling book of the same name (which I also reviewed, here).