President Trump Criticizes 'Alt-Left' Groups in #Charlottesville (VIDEO)

I've had a long day working on my materials for my classes. Plus, I did some puttering around again this afternoon at my used bookstores. I'm a little tired. But tuning in to the news makes me even more tired. I'm tired of all the identity politics all the time. Seriously, it's physically, emotionally, and intellectually draining. I'd prefer not to deal with it, because there's very little truth involved in what most people are saying.

Here's the headline at the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "A Combative Trump Criticizes ‘Alt-Left’ Groups in Charlottesville."

I obviously think both sides should be criticized. There's no defense of neo-Confederates and Nazis, clearly. There shouldn't be a defense of radical left "antifa" groups either, although all kinds of folks --- including major mass-media types --- are praising "alt-left" activists for "standing up" to racism.

I can't even any more. This is just too stupid. America has become too stupid as a country. The beltway and coastal elites, along with the fake news MSM, are leading the country down to the lowest common denominator. And we're talking really low. Handball against the curb low. And to think, I'm reading elevated history and philosophy (like Bertrand Russell!) and I have have a sense of near helplessness and futility in hoping to personally turn things around. But then, no worries. I'm a professor. Some students will take away some knowledge and wisdom from my classes this fall. The SJWs won't learn at thing, of course, and I can't help them. They're truly a lost cause.

In any case, here's some video for you. I'm going to blog more books tonight. That's what's keeping me sane. Books, and bikini babes, heh.



PREVIOUSLY: "Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?"

Barry Strauss, The Death of Caesar

At Amazon, Barry Strauss, The Death of Caesar: The Story of History’s Most Famous Assassination.

It’s Not Just Google — All of Silicon Valley Has a Trust Problem Now

That's for sure.

At Instapundit, "MY USA TODAY COLUMN: It’s not just Google — all of Silicon Valley has a trust problem now. “When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry”."

Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus.

Haley Kalil, Miss Minnesota 2014, for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit (VIDEO)

Lovely.

Demi Rose Strips Down

At the Sun U.K., "PEACH ON THE BEACHDemi: Demi Rose strips off naked and shows off her incredible bum for sexy new photoshoot in Santorini - The stunning model stripped nude as she prepared to indulge in a spot of hot tub skinny dipping on the Greek island."

Also, at London's Daily Mail, "Sultry Demi Rose Mawby leaves little to the imagination in completely NAKED beach shoot."

And on Twitter.

Anne Hathaway Nude Photos Leaked (NSFW)

At Drunken Stepfather, "Anne Hathaway Alleged Nudes I Won’t Post Cuz of Lawsuits and Stuff."

Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?

So far, it's a cold civil war, waged on the battlefields of politics and culture. But things are heating up, seriously.

Here's Robin Wright, at the New Yorker, "The recent unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia, after a white-supremacist rally has stoked some Americans’ fears of a new civil war":

A day after the brawling and racist brutality and deaths in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, Saint Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.

America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policy asked to evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.

“We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.

Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.

President Trump “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign,” Mines wrote in Foreign Policy. “Judging from recent events the left is now fully on board with this,” he continued, citing anarchists in anti-globalization riots as one of several flashpoints. “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.”
To test Mines’s conjecture, I reached out to five prominent Civil War historians this weekend. “When you look at the map of red and blue states and overlap on top of it the map of the Civil War—and who was allied with who in the Civil War—not much has changed,” Judith Giesberg, the editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and a historian at Villanova University, told me. “We never agreed on the outcome of the Civil War and the direction the country should go in. The postwar amendments were highly contentious—especially the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law—and they still are today. What does it mean to deliver voting rights to people of color? We still don’t know.”

She added, “Does that make us vulnerable to a repeat of the past? I don’t see a repeat of those specific circumstances. But that doesn’t mean we are not entering something similar in the way of a culture war. We are vulnerable to racism, tribalism, and conflicting visions of the way forward for our nation.”

Anxiety over deepening schisms and new conflict has an outlet in popular culture: in April, Amazon selected the dystopian novel “American War”—which centers on a second U.S. civil war—as one of its best books of the month. In a review in the Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote, “Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions . . . both poignant and horrifying.” The Times book reviewer noted, “It’s a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway.” The book’s author, Omar El Akkad, was born in Egypt and covered the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and the Ferguson protest as a journalist for Canada’s Globe and Mail...

Folks can see why I was so fascinated with El Akkad's book. I highly recommend it. Here, Omar El Akkad, American War.

And keep reading Wright's piece, here.

Tom Holland, Rubicon

*BUMPED.*

This one comes highly recommended.

At Amazon, Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic.

Ann Coulter, Demonic

I tweeted last night, "The left is just one big mob at this point. It's a collective descent into mob mentality, and from that comes mass murder. #Charlottesville."

And now I saw this one minutes ago, ".@AnnCoulter tried warning us. Liberalism is a demonic mentality that openly promotes violent mob uprisings to advance their agenda."

It's true.

And it's a great book, at Amazon, Ann Coulter, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

The Left Exploits the #Charlottesville Tragedy

From Joseph Klein, at FrontPage Mag, "Hypocritical left excuses its own violence while taking aim at Trump."

John Gooch, Mussolini and his Generals

Well, it's not Ancient Rome, although Benito Mussolini did claim that he'd turn the Mediterranean into a "Roman lake." It didn't quite turn out that way, but still, the history's interesting.

At Amazon, John Gooch, Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940.

Danielle Gersh's Warmup Forecast

It's been quite mild this last few days.

I'm enjoying my last couple of weeks of vacation. My syllabi are done, although I have a handout I need to prepare before I send everything to the copy shop. Other than that, as noted, I've been puttering around at used bookstores throughout the O.C. I'm not watching any news on TV, and reading as little as I can right now, frankly, as it's mostly fake news by preening morally suspect progs.

In any case, there's always the weather. Here's the fabulous Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

The classic text.

I'm reviewing my copy to check out the impact of Ancient Rome on Western philosophy, since I'm immersing myself in this literature.

At Amazon, Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy.

The Poison of Identity Politics

Following-up, "President Trump Repudiates White Supremacists: 'Racism is Evil' (VIDEO)."

An excellent editorial, at WSJ, "The return of white nationalism is part of a deeper ailment":

As ever in this age of Donald Trump, politicians and journalists are reducing the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday to a debate over Mr. Trump’s words and intentions. That’s a mistake no matter what you think of the President, because the larger poison driving events like those in Virginia is identity politics and it won’t go away when Mr. Trump inevitably does.

The particular pathology on display in Virginia was the white nationalist movement led today by the likes of Richard Spencer, David Duke and Brad Griffin. They alone are to blame for the violence that occurred when one of their own drove a car into peaceful protesters, killing a young woman and injuring 19 others.

The Spencer crowd courts publicity and protests, and they chose the progressive university town of Charlottesville with malice aforethought. They used the unsubtle Ku Klux Klan symbolism of torches in a Friday night march, and they seek to appear as political martyrs as a way to recruit more alienated young white men.

Political conservatives even more than liberals need to renounce these racist impulses, and the good news is that this is happening. The driver has been charged with murder under Virginia law, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions opened a federal civil-rights investigation and issued a statement condemning the violence: “When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.” Many prominent conservatives also denounced the white-nationalist movement.

Mr. Trump was widely criticized for his initial statement Saturday afternoon that condemned the hatred “on many sides” but failed to single out the white nationalists. Notably, David Duke and his allies read Mr. Trump’s statement as attacking them and criticized the President for doing so.

The White House nonetheless issued a statement Sunday saying Mr. Trump “includes white supremacists, KKK, Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups” in his condemnation. As so often with Mr. Trump, his original statement missed an opportunity to speak like a unifying political leader.

Yet the focus on Mr. Trump is also a cop-out because it lets everyone duck the deeper and growing problem of identity politics on the right and left. The politics of white supremacy was a poison on the right for many decades, but the civil-rights movement rose to overcome it, and it finally did so in the mid-1960s with Martin Luther King Jr. ’s language of equal opportunity and color-blind justice.

That principle has since been abandoned, however, in favor of a new identity politics that again seeks to divide Americans by race, ethnicity, gender and even religion. “Diversity” is now the all-purpose justification for these divisions, and the irony is that America is more diverse and tolerant than ever.

The problem is that the identity obsessives want to boil down everything in American life to these categories. In practice this means allocating political power, contracts, jobs and now even salaries in the private economy based on the politics of skin color or gender rather than merit or performance. Down this road lies crude political tribalism, and James Damore’s recent Google dissent is best understood as a cri de coeur that we should aspire to something better. Yet he lost his job merely for raising the issue.

A politics fixated on indelible differences will inevitably lead to resentments that extremists can exploit in ugly ways on the right and left. The extremists were on the right in Charlottesville, but there have been examples on the left in Berkeley, Oakland and numerous college campuses. When Democratic politicians can’t even say “all lives matter” without being denounced as bigots, American politics has a problem.

Mr. Trump didn’t create this identity obsession even if as a candidate he did try to exploit it. He is more symptom than cause, though as President he now has a particular obligation to renounce it. So do other politicians. Yet the only mission of nearly every Democrat we observed on the weekend was to use the “white supremacist” cudgel against Mr. Trump—as if that is the end of the story...

Still more.

Tom Holland, Persian Fire

At Amazon, Tom Holland, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West.

President Trump Repudiates White Supremacists: 'Racism is Evil' (VIDEO)

No leftist will be satisfied. Trump gives a beautiful, heartfelt all-American statement, unequivocally rebuking far-right racist extremism.

But no leftist will be satisfied. I saw this morning progs on Twitter saying it didn't matter what Trump said, because they wouldn't believe him.

Whose hearts are filled with hatred again?

At Bloomberg, via Memeorandum, "Trump Denounces White Supremacists After Backlash."

Another thing: White supremacists are truly fringe. Whereas the violent, murderous communists of Black Lives Matter have been embraced by the entire left-wing establishment, which included at the time President Obama flying to Dallas to defend the genocidal racist organiztion.

There is no equivalence. Leftists have blood on their hands. They've mainstreamed groups like BLM, and now Antifa, with no concomitant backlash whatsoever.

This is why I'm not following politics closely right now. The mainstream media, the coastal progs, and the leftist Beltway establishment are evil hypocrisy incarnate.

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan: A Novel.

The planet has become radioactive. Humans — or, the creatures that were once humans — live on a shelf suspended above the soil, their skin nearly translucent and tattooed with the literal stories of their own existence. There is only one person who can save them from a brutal overlord — a child soldier, destined to become a martyr to the cause of existence. This is her story; this is The Book of Joan (source).

Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

*BUMPED.*

Here's something different. It looks wonderful.

At Amazon, Matthew Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore: A Novel.

Colleen McCullough, The Grass Crown

Following-up from Wednesday, "Colleen McCullough's 'Masters of Rome' Series."

I'm finishing-up Spartacus this afternoon. And I've already dipped into The First Man in Rome, which is the first book of McCollough's series.

Here's The Grass Crown.

Depending how much I buckle down and read, I'm normally going to finish a book like Spartacus in about three days. That's almost 100 pages a day. So, if I really clamp down on this, I could finish The First Man in Rome in about two weeks. But, as is my wont, I often have a couple of books going at the same time (to break up the monotony, I guess). I started Tom Holland's Rubicon yesterday, and it's great. Once the semester starts (on August 28th) I won't have as much time to dawdle with all these books. I read at night a bit during the semester, when there's nothing on TV I want to watch. I don't get through as many books. Summer's when I really get to range widely, so to speak. It's a lot of fun.

Thanks for your support!