Summer Reading List

 Now that summer is winding down, the days are shortening, and Labor Day is around the bend, it’s a good time to take stock of where we are.  On one of her recent podcasts, Megyn Kelly mentioned that she thought that Labor Day was a better day for a fresh start than New Year’s Day.   Those of us still stuck in the circadian rhythm of an academic calendar so many years later tend to agree.  Labor Day marks a “back to business” turn of the calendar after barbeques, beaches and long, soft, languorous evenings.

And as we head into fall, it seems that our society as we once knew it is being shaken to the core, values are being inverted, the elite and the criminal class are being protected, encased in protective cocoons, while the rest of us are being bullied, taxed, intimidated, and, in our inner cities, actually assaulted be the criminal class.  Institutions that we thought inviolate—the F.B.I., CDC, and our school systems from K-12 to higher education have been hijacked.   Drag queens and school librarians, and the medical profession sexualize our young children, and in the most egregious government absurdity, millions of illegals cross our border unimpeded and with them loads of deadly fentanyl while New York makes it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase whipped cream in a canister.

There are days, I am sure, that, like me, you are trying to figure out what, exactly is going on.  These are the books that I recommend to help sort things out and restore your sanity—or at least help you understand that your disorientation is warranted.

The War on the West by Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray has emerged as a leading public intellectual and a worthy heir to the position left void after the death of William F. Buckley.   I find it terribly ironic that the leading intellectuals defending Western democracy and culture are NOT American (see Yoram Hyzony below).   I list Murray’s short, succinct and very readable book as indispensable for an understanding of what we are up against—a serious attack on the West as we have seen since WWII. 

               “In other words, it may be worth recognizing what we are up against when we hear the critics of the West today.  For just as we are not up against justice, but rather up against vengeance, so we are not truly up only against proponents of equality, but also against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction.”

If you only have time to read one, this is it.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

Hanson has been deeply concerned about this revolutionary movement, a Democratic party that resembles the Soviet apparatus more closely than the working man’s Democratic party of a generation or two ago.  He cites the globalist pretensions of the elite, the open and unsymmetric trade with China, open borders and a huge unelected and powerful bureaucracy as some of the forces that are eroding America’s uniqueness. 

               “When American companies outsource their jobs overseas, the American worker usually becomes weaker, not stronger.  When elites enjoy trillions of dollars in joint-venture investments in China, they are less, not more, likely to speak out against authoritarian Chinese anti-Americanism.  When the international community seeks to establish climate change canons for the United States without a constitutionally mandated treaty, the US Congress becomes weaker, not stronger.”

Hanson’s book, along with his podcasts, keep you anchored and aware of how far we have drifted from our unified sense and purpose as a nation, as well as from Constitutional norms.

Conservatism: A Rediscovery by Yoram Hazony

Hazony’s book is among the most thought provoking and enlightening to me.   I’ve struggled to decide whether I am a conservative or a libertarian, a conservative with libertarian leanings, or a libertarian with conservative leanings, and I suspect I am not alone in that regard.  Hazony, an Israeli, helped me clarify those issues and makes a compelling case as to why Jeffersonian liberalism left the door open to this neo-Marxist wave we are experiencing.   Hazony emphasizes the need for the US to return to its Christian roots (with accommodation for Judaism) a premise with which I agree.  The erosion of Christianity has allowed Wokeism to move in as a competing religion.

Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher

Dreher’s book is also very short and readable.  The title taken from the quote by Aleksander Solzenitsyn, Dreher warns of the soft totalitarian encroachment by the radical Left.  Like Hazony, Dreher sees a return to Christianity as a pillar against this encroachment:

Communism had a particular ideological vision that required it to destroy traditions, including traditional Christianity.  Nothing outside the communist order could be allowed to exist…. This is why Hannah Arendt described the totalitarian personality as “the completely isolated human being.”  A person duc off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Reading Dreher, you will see why the neo-communists are eager to rewrite history (The 1619 Project) and tear down and deface our statues.

Now, it you’d rather ingest this by way of fiction, there is none other than Lionel Shriver.  She is far and away my favorite living fiction writer.

The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver

Published in 2016, before COVID and the coming of the Biden, her novel centers around a US debt crisis, and collapse of the US economy, and the ensuing social collapse and rise of an authoritarian government.  It is frighteningly prescient as some people escape to outlying states (Nevada) to attempt to put themselves beyond the reach of an authoritarian US government.

While I highly recommend The Mandibles, Should We Stay or Should We Go and The Motion of the Body Through Space also are excellent products of Shriver’s sharp, incisive mind.

I know I may have gotten this backwards---putting out the summer reading list at summer’s end, but these selections promise to enlighten you in the coming chilly autumn evenings.

Thuggery

 A few months ago, I posted about the emergence of stealth Islamism in the U.S.

https://commonsense-mark.blogspot.com/2022/05/stealth-islamism.html

The indicia of Islamism seeping into our society are all around us, I observed, although they have arrived under a different rubric.   But the signs are unmistakable--- forced facial coverings (under the rubric of COVID measures), genital mutilation (under the rubric of trans rights), and the conversion of higher education into madrassas (teaching Wokeism rather than critical thinking).   Taken together, these things start to look suspiciously like fundamentalist Islam gaining a foothold in the U.S. by stealth.

But this week, Islamism broke out into the open with the attack on Salman Rushdie, fulfilling the order of a decades old fatwah issued by Ruhollah Khomeini back in 1989.  The knife attack was severe and Rushdie was put on a ventilator for some time.  He suffered nerve damage to his arm and may lose an eye.  Rushdie’s attacker has been arrested and charged with attempted murder and purportedly had loads of pro-Iranian regime posts on social media.   The New York Times and other media outlets, however, are predictably reporting that they “have no idea what his motive might be.”   Twitter, while banishing the likes of Jordan Peterson, James Lindsay and Donald Trump, has permitted Islamists praising Rushdie’s attacker to voice such sentiments on its platform. 

And remember, police foiled an attempt to kidnap and silence Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad just last summer with no reaction from our government.  Likewise, the attack on Rushdie has not elicited an outcry from this terrorist incident from our State Department.

Also, last week, the DOJ and FBI took the unprecedented step of raiding Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago.  Merrick Garland, who is intent on putting the bananas in banana republic, claimed that Trump had documents in his possession that belonged in the national archives and some of the materials may have been classified. 

The FBI, which is at a nadir of credibility after looking the other way on Hillary Clinton’s misdeeds, Hunter Biden’s shenanigans, Barack Obama’s removal of presidential materials, the fabricated evidence used to defraud the FISA court and enable the FBI to spy on Donald Trump.   And now, it has taken the radical step of raiding the dwelling of a political opponent. 

This is truly scary stuff for our republic.  It’s the stuff of the KGB, the Gestapo and South American dictatorships.   It’s pretty clear that after all the caterwauling by the Left about the US supporting tinpot dictatorships during the Cold War (and the constant drumbeat that Trump himself had totalitarian inclinations), once they have gained power, they have no inhibitions about actually becoming what they complained about. 

The attack on Rushdie and the unprecedented raid on Trump’s residence may seem like they are unrelated occurrences.   But they are not.  The radical Left and radical Islam are closet allies now.  Remember that the Biden (Obama) administration is frantically working to lift sanctions and resurrect the fatally flawed JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal).  It sees Israel as the oppressor in the Middle East and seeks to empower Iran and diminish Israel’s standing in the Middle East.   Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are revered members of The Squad, and their rank antisemitism has been whitewashed by Pelosi and Biden.   Although there is evidence that Rushdie’s attacker was in communication with the Iranian regime, the Biden administration has been curiously silent about this vicious attack on not only a pre-eminent author but on one of the most sacred principles of the West.

In addition to the eerie fetish for face coverings, the Iranian regime and the Biden regime are both keen on silencing apostates.   Recall that Trump’s powerful signature line at the 2016 RNC was “I am your voice!”  The radical Left decided that could not stand and went to work undermining Trump at every turn, culminating in last week’s unprecedented raid.   Recently, the Biden regime tried to muzzle free speech with its Disinformation Governance Board until it was mocked out of existence.  For now, the Biden administration will have to be content to try to control dissenters’ speech through its proxies in social media, NPR and the New York Times.   The Islamists of Iran are a bit more blunt--- they will do it with knives, guns and bombs when opportunity arises.

The radical Left declared a fatwah against Donald Trump just as Khomeini did against Rushdie. 

The parallels are unmistakable if you are looking for them.

Show Me the Data

 In this era of obfuscation and false narrative, there are two mantras that bear repeating:  Show Me the Data and Follow the Money.  (Unfortunately, “Show Me The Data has already been taken by someone as her Twitter handle or would have grabbed it).  If we were to follow just those two precepts, the nation would be in much, much better shape.   Taken together, they strip out narrative and partisanship, and imply a healthy level of skepticism.  Applied to policy, they will likely us you on the correct path, or at least help avoid costly blunders.

The first incredible blunder with the handling of data in recent years was the second Gulf War.  While information gathered through intelligence sources is often uncertain, the magnitude of this blunder was enormous.  Launched under the justification that Saddam Hussein had violated the cease fire (true) of the first Gulf War and was developing WMD (not true), the US launched a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killed and maimed thousands of US service men and women, cost trillions of dollars and ended up empowering Iran at the end of the day.  All with scanty evidence that the assertion was, in fact, true.

Not to be outdone, our CDC, NIH and Anthony Fauci likewise reacted horrifically and imposed enormous costs on our country by not only misinterpreting data, but putting out false and sketchy data itself.  Even worse than was the case in the first Gulf War, social media served to either suppress or amplify evidence as it chose.  Individuals that spoke to the credibility of the Lab Leak Theory of COVID’s origin were banned from social media as were people that espoused the use of Ivermectin as a treatment.   We never really got an accurate figure of COVID deaths because the CDC obfuscated deaths “with COVID” and “from COVID.”   The CDC relentlessly pushed vaccines, even with little evidence of their efficacy and with no data on their long term adverse effects.  Government forced members of our armed forces out of service and forced children to be masked in school, doing terrible damage to our national security and the intellectual and emotional development of our children—with no benefit.  Now, life insurance companies are reporting a 40% increase in death rates among 18-49 year olds.  We are seeing evidence of increases in myocardia, and other maladies.  One of the nation’s top female athletes, Nelly Korda was recently hospitalized with blood clots.   Joe Biden, among others, contracted COVID despite being vaccinated a double boosted, yet the CDC had blathered last year that this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”   As with the second Gulf War, the government manipulated the data to create a narrative that was extremely costly for the US, and unnecessarily so.

Then there was the narrative that the police were targeting blacks unjustly and shooting innocent, unarmed blacks systemically.    The trouble is that the data never matched the narrative.  Tucker Carlson did his homework and went through each incident of a police shooting of an unarmed black in the previous year and found only 2 situations where the shooting was unjustified and those were prosecuted.   When Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer in a careful study likewise found no disparity in the treatment of blacks by the Houston police department, however, he was “canceled” by Harvard with a trumped us sexual harassment charge (I will write more on that in a subsequent post).  This narrative is being used to justify “defunding the police” with catastrophic consequences for our cities.

Likewise, the Department of Justice claims that white supremacism remains a top security threat (especially at school board meetings).  Yet we see no actual evidence to support that assertion.

We have plenty of  smart and sophisticated people and analytical techniques available to use data to come to sound policy decisions for our society.  It’s time we start using them.