Steven Ozment, A Mighty Fortress

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Steven Ozment, A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People.

[ADDED: I put this one on order, as I'm interested in the "German barbarians" who fought against the Roman legions in antiquity, as I mentioned earlier.]

Democrat 'Nazi Hunters' Gone Wild

You gotta read this.

R.S. McCain has the post, "Robert Tracinski Kills It," linking to an article entitled "Nazi-Hunting Fantasies Have Unhinged the Left."

This Nazi-hunting hysteria's going to turn out badly for the hard-left Democrats, as it shows them to be bankrupt --- morally, politically, philosophically bankrupt. When you have to attack everyone as a Nazi no one's a Nazi, and that doesn't reflect well on the historical memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. See, for example, Matt Vespa, at Town Hall, via Memeorandum, "Howard Dean: If You Vote Republican in 2018, You're a Racist."

Jo Beth Taylor Bikini Pics

She's an Australian television personality, at Drunken Stepfather, "Jo Beth Taylor Bikini on the Beach."

Also on Instagram, of course.

Steven Pressfield, Tides of War

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Steven Pressfield, Tides of War: A Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War.

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

This one's a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

At Amazon, Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel.

Fifteen #Antifa Photos You'll Never See in the Far-Left 'Mainstream' Media

From Doug Ross, at Director Blue, "15 Antifa Photos You'll Never See in Legacy Media."

"There are no words..."#Antifa pic.twitter.com/iv3LpZcto4

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) August 20, 2017

Bushnell Legend L-Series Binoculars

At Amazon, Bushnell Legend L-Series 10x42mm Binoculars (Deal of the Day: $130.99 and FREE Shipping).

Plus, check out all of Today's Deals.

Also, Hershey's 36ct. Plus 1 Bonus Bar (37 Bars Total).

And, LÖFBERG'S KHARISMA: Roast Level 4/5, Whole Bean Coffee, 400g.

More, Seiko SSB031 Men's Chronograph Stainless Steel Case Watch.

Here, Rawlings ST5 Horween Leather Official Size Football: RAWLINGS SOFT TOUCH FOOTBALL.

Still more, Mountain House Just In Case...Classic Assortment Bucket.

And, KIND Healthy Grains Granola Bars, Oats & Honey with Toasted Coconut, Gluten Free, 1.2oz Bars, 15 Count.

BONUS: Carlo D'Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943.

Mizzou Enrollment Plunges

I wonder why?

At Instapundit, "HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Mizzou suffering brutal long-term impacts of 2015 protests."

And from Jillian Kay Melchior, at WSJ, "Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left":

Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.

“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.

He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.

The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.

Two weeks later, a student announced he was going on a hunger strike, and the football team refused to practice or play until the university met the demands. As protesters occupied the quad, administrators bent over backward to accommodate them, even providing a power strip so they could charge phones and a generator so they could camp in comfort. A communications instructor, Melissa Click, appeared on viral video calling for “muscle” to remove a student reporter from the quad. By Nov. 9, both the president and the chancellor of Mizzou, as the flagship Columbia campus is known, had resigned.

Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”

"Berkeley of the Midwest." Ouch.

Still more.

More Than 70 Percent of Republicans Approve of President Trump's Response to #Charlotteville

I didn't check the poll, from Brad Parscale, but since leftist mass-media polls have been slamming the president's response, I'll bet this America First survey nails it.

Trump Republican approval to Charlottesville 70%+ in swing states. Only 17% disapprove. #FakeNews just pushing their agenda. #BetterDataWins pic.twitter.com/zyHvtB051O

— Brad Parscale (@parscale) August 21, 2017

Out in Paper: J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test

*BUMPED.*

In paperback, available at Amazon, J. Kael Weston, The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

G.J. Meyer, The Tudors

*BUMPED.*

G.J. Meyer, The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

*BUMPED.*

I don't see copies of Thomas Pynchon's books when I'm out shopping at used bookstores. But he's regularly cited in jacket blurbs and his stuff comes up on Amazon, in the "what others bought" prompts, and so forth. In any case, I'll keep looking while I'm out and about.

Meanwhile, at Amazon, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow.

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

I finally picked up my copy.

And available at Amazon, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize Winner) (National Book Award Winner) (Oprah's Book Club).

Evelyn Taft's Warm-up Forecast

Well, we keep hearing it's going to warm up, but it's been so mild this summer it's crazy. I guess I shouldn't complain. No doubt we'll get a nasty intolerable heat wave in September, and I've got to be teaching. Sometimes the air conditioning in the classrooms isn't so great. You can't set the thermostat. So, students open the windows and that makes it worse by the afternoon.

In any case, school starts next Monday. I'm enjoying my last week of lollygagging, lol.

Here's the lovely Ms. Evelyn, for KCAL 9 News Los Angeles:

Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Victor Davis Hanson, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Radical Leftists Are Never Considered 'Fringe'

Here's this, at the far-left NYT (safe link), "The Showdown Over How We Define Fringe Views in America":

Today in the United States, sweeping majorities of the public say they support fair housing laws and the ideal of integrated schools. Nine in 10 say they would back a black candidate for president from their own party, and the same say they approve of marriage between blacks and whites. That last issue has undergone one of the greatest transformations in polling over the last 50 years. In 1960, just 4 percent of Americans approved.

More than a triumph over private prejudice, these numbers reflect changing social norms. The country hasn’t extinguished racism. But society — universities, employers, cultural institutions, the military — has made clearer over time that people who hold racist views had better nurse them off in the corner.

But these norms may be fraying. Since the last presidential election, and particularly since white supremacists rallied this month, unmasked, in Charlottesville, Va., the line between acceptable and ostracized views has started to become less stark. When President Trump declined to condemn white supremacists more forcefully, he ignited a fight that at its core is about how we define norms in America: Who gets to be part of civil society, and whose views belong on the fringe?

That fight is being waged by opposing protesters across the country and by pundits daily on TV. The president’s critics fear that he is inviting white supremacists out of the corner, helping ideas that have become widely reviled in America to be redefined as reasonable opinions — just part of the discussion.

“They are explicitly trying to do that,” Tina Fetner, a sociologist at McMaster University in Ontario, said of members of white supremacist groups. Until recently, they were ignored. But now the president is repeating their memes and the distorted versions of history that prop up their views, she said. As a result, the news media is broadly covering them, too.

“This is exactly the process of how social change happens,” Ms. Fetner said. “It’s not because all of a sudden there is more racism now than there was a few weeks ago. It’s that the absolute condemnation of those most abhorrent views is crumbling away because the president isn’t fulfilling that role.”

Ms. Fetner has studied the transformation in views on gay rights and same-sex marriage. The shifts around race and gender similarly reflect not just widening acceptance of equality, but also the rising condemnation of anyone who vocally opposes it.

Polls don’t necessarily capture how people truly feel; they capture what people are willing to say to a pollster. But the idea that some people might lie in surveys illustrates how social norms work. And political scientists suspect that part of what Mr. Trump has done, through his anti-immigrant and nativist appeals, is encourage people who might have kept silent in the past about their racist views to express them in public.

“For all these years, this is a group of people that’s been very bitter about the fact that they feel like they can’t speak,” said Sarah Sobieraj, a sociologist at Tufts. “It’s not just that their policies haven’t been popular.” And then Mr. Trump says similar things, with a powerful platform, without apology.

When norms of acceptable behavior and speech start to shift, it can disturb the shared beliefs, values and symbols that make up our culture. “It’s really all of those things that we’re watching right now — they’re all up for discussion,” Ms. Sobieraj said...

This, of course, is all B.S., because it's only the alleged "alt-right" whose views are considered "fringe" and unacceptable. You never get wall-to-wall coverage of major stories like just last week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's son stated that radical leftists are the far bigger threat today. (See the Times of Israel, "Yair Netanyahu says leftists more dangerous than neo-Nazis.")

As I've said for years, the Democrats' motto is "no enemies on the left," and that motto is now the default position of all the major actors of the institutional left. See John Fund, at NRO (via Memeorandum), "‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of Too Many Liberals."

I haven't been following politics, or blogging politics, all that much this last couple of weeks. And you can see why. We're in the middle of an all-out war on the Trump administration and his supporters, and there's no depth the leftist mass media won't sink in its campaign against truth and decency.

Radical leftists are the real threat to American freedom, prosperity, and security. And to defeat the radical left, you have to defeat all the institutions of cultural, economic, and political domination now working against traditional America. It's a cold civil war at this point, but that's just temporary. Regular folks will only take so much before they put up a fight. And as the radical left is never satisfied (as evidenced by the current leftist campaign to remove Confederate statues from the public sphere across the country), there comes a time when you have to stand up and be held to account for your values.

That's where we are today in America. There will be blood.

Faith Goldy's Statement on #Charlottesville (VIDEO)

It turns out she made a final video at the Rebel before leaving the outlet.

Following-up, "So, the Rebel Media's Having Some Problems..."

So, the Rebel Media's Having Some Problems...

Following-up from the other day, "Faith Goldy Fired from Rebel Media."

I just saw this Reuters piece, linked at Mediagazer, "Canada's conservative Rebel Media site down after service cut." And reading it I find that, in addition to Goldy, "Several other contributors have left the online publication over the past week and some prominent conservative Canada politicians have also sought to distance themselves from the site .... The defections include co-founder Brian Lilley, who according to the Globe and Media was uncomfortable with the site's increasing harsh tone and growing association with the likes of white nationalist Richard Spencer."

Oh, ahem, that's pretty major.

So, googling around I see this piece at the Daily Caller, "Rebel Media Implodes" (safe link):

It’s chaos this week at Rebel Media, one of the few conservative media resources available in Canada.

In the last week, the news service has lost at least four employees to resignation and another to a firing while Rebel founder and editor-in-chief Ezra Levant now says he is being blackmailed over alleged misuse of fundraising dollars.

And forget the November cruise where Levant promised up close and personal interaction between Rebel personalities and supporters. Norwegian Cruise Lines is no longer sponsoring the Caribbean voyage, citing the Rebel’s politics being “inconsistent” with their own vision of the world.

New Canadian Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer cancelled a Friday interview with the Rebel, citing in a statement the need to change the “editorial directions” of the news service.

The cancellation just the latest in a series of corporate rebuffs that have hurt Rebel Media’s advertising base.

The trouble all started last weekend when headline reporter Faith Goldy — fired on Thursday — was covering the Charlottesville protest. Her on-scene commentary was perceived as favorable to the white supremacists that leadership candidates in the newly-minted United Conservative Party of Alberta began to complain and insist that the party distance itself from The Rebel.

Levant sent a memo to supporters — and obtained by The Daily Caller — on Tuesday that disaowed any support for the alt-right; but it was not enough to satisfy malcontents within the organization.

Co-founder and commentator Brain Lilley quit on Wednesday. That resignation was followed by the departures of contributors Barbara Kay and John Robson.

Levant announced Thursday that provocative right-wing commentator Gavin McInnes had also left the company.

Now Levant says he is being blackmailed by former British contributor Caolan Robertson, who released a video on Thursday on YouTube that alleges Rebel Media has been conducting dishonest fundraising campaigns for the express purposes of raising money for the organization and increasing into database...

More.

And see Ezra Levant himself, at the Rebel, "Blackmail: Setting the record straight."

It's hard out there.

Pamela Geller Banned (Then Restored) by PayPal

If anyone knows it's a multi-front war over the battlespace, it's Pamela.

See, "EXCELSIOR! PAYPAL RESTORES AFDI."

.@PayPal banned me. It's like pre-war Germany. Leftists run amok. #Boycottpaypalhttps://t.co/QxQQ0XrQzi pic.twitter.com/ayUixhMW3Z

— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) August 21, 2017

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

At Amazon, Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (50th Anniversary Edition).