Resistance is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind, by Ann Coulter

You want evidence of justice department and media corruption?  Coulter’s got the goods -- in spades, and served with her signature rapier wit.  Resistance is Futile doesn’t simply rehash talking points about Hillary’s serial lawbreaking, Mueller’s partisan probe, or Deep State subversion of an opposition President, though all those matters are treated with lawyerly and comedic deftness.  (Think My Cousin Vinny.)  First and foremost Coulter’s book is about collusion -- the democracy-demolishing collusion between Democrats and the mainstream media that has existed for decades but which a white-hot hatred for the “vulgarian” Trump has made unmistakably clear to most Americans.  On the bright side, this exposure is actually destroying journalism, which the author says must perish and be rebuilt on an ethical foundation for democracy to survive.  Coulter provides a veritable avalanche of media inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and lost-their-mind absurdities to support her conclusion. 

For example, Democrats and their media lackeys who only yesterday decried federal surveillance of possible terrorists (and who nearly defrocked John Brennan for lying to Sen. Diane Feinstein about the CIA’s enhanced spying activity) now view that same man as a paragon of rectitude.  Indeed, they regularly denounce as unpatriotic anyone who questions the validity of warrants obtained from a secret court to spy on Americans associated with the Trump campaign -- even during the campaign!  The same coterie of co-conspirators who were eager to vindicate Alger Hiss and praise cooperation with the Soviet Union, now portray Putin’s Russia as the gravest threat to America since 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.  According to these partisans, Putin must be publicly vilified and his country harshly punished for interfering with an American election via a few thousand Facebook ads -- many supporting Trump, some supporting Bernie, others touting Ted Cruz, Jill Stein, Black Lives Matter, United Muslims of America, and even Hillary.

This breakdown comes from Muller’s own indictment of the 13 villainous Russians he is clearly not anxious to see in court, having backed away from an expedited trial when one of the Russian ham sandwiches actually sent a legal team to the U.S. to have the charges against him adjudicated.  One possibly exculpatory element of that defense would be the fact that most of the Facebook ads were placed after the election and even jumped on the Resistance bandwagon.  Mueller, by the way, has the distinction of being FBI director during two of the bureau’s most famous screw-ups.  First, Republican Senator Ted Stevens was falsely accused of lying to investigators (sound familiar?) eight days before an election that he lost by less than 2 percent.  When the trial judge discovered prosecutors had withheld vital exculpatory evidence, he threw out the case and demanded an investigation of the investigators.

Then there was the anthrax case where Mueller worked “in lockstep” with his hand-chosen investigator, Richard Palmer.  Together these vigilantes all but destroyed the life of Steven Hatfill, an innocent U.S. Army biodefense researcher whom the FBI hounded relentlessly for six years because he fit the Bureau’s profile: “a ‘flag-waving’ patriot.”  Even after a federal judge said the investigators hadn’t found “a scintilla of evidence” against Hatfill and the government later settled with Hatfill for almost six million dollars, Mueller said, “I do not apologize for any aspect of this investigation.”  There you have the “honorable” Robert Mueller.

When it comes to immigration, the media’s “heads I win, tails you lose” reportage depends on who resides in the White House.  While Obama lived there, federal law and even federal policy that ignored those laws, ruled supreme.  That’s what CNN’s law expert informed us after Arizona vainly attempted to enforce federal immigration laws in 2010. But now that Trump’s address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s perfectly ok for blue states to ignore federal immigration law.  Indeed, thanks to a few lower court rulings cheered by mainstream media pundits, the President is now unable to exercise his “clear constitutional and federal authority” to “exclude immigrants in the best interests of the United States.”   

NBC’s release of the embarrassing 2005 Access Hollywood tape just weeks before the November election provides yet another example of media partisanship.  This electoral kill-shot, according to Coulter, “breached all professional norms and probably the law.”  By contrast, NBC’s current President, Andy Lack, when heading NBC News in 1999, “held the network’s interview with Juanita Broaddrick” in which she accused Bill Clinton of rape until after the President’s impeachment trial.  In this case timing says everything you need to know about Lack, NBC, partisanship, and a willingness to place more importance on a braggadocious utterance about consensual groping within a celebrity culture (“They let you do it,” Trump added.) than multiple accusations of actual predatory behavior by a Democrat.      

Other matters diligently dissected by Coulter include Trump’s wildly mischaracterized Charlottesville statement, George Soros’s plundering of Russia and manipulation of foreign elections, the false claim that Trump asked Russia to “hack” Hillary’s private email server, the media’s misreporting about changes to the 2016 GOP Platform in order to suggest Russian influence, and an honest comparison of Watergate with the Mueller probe.  Concerning the latter, Coulter comments, “Imagine what G. Gordon Liddy could have done working from the inside of the FBI, with FISA warrants and government-paid spies!”

Coulter offers these two summary judgments about the current special prosecutor’s investigation:  “The very nature of Mueller’s probe is Soviet justice.  He has an open-ended commission to look for any crimes committed by anyone connected to the Trump campaign…. If the Russians were trying to sow discord and undermine confidence in our democracy, then the guy they probably colluded with was Robert Mueller.” 

Closing arguments directed at the media include the following observations:  “Fake news means reporting, for example, that Trump colluded with Russia to sway the election when it was the Democratic Party and the FBI that colluded with Russia to sway the election.”  Put otherwise, Russia “is accused of doing to the Democrats what the media do to Republicans every election cycle.”

Despite her full-throated defense of the President against leftist and media insanity, Resistance is Futile isn’t a Trump hagiography.  Coulter even describes the President as “utterly undisciplined” and “the crudest kind of braggart.”  In Coulter’s estimation, however, these flaws pale when compared with Trump’s failure to achieve his primary campaign promise, stopping illegal immigration.  Coulter ends her case with the less-than-sanguine hope that Trump may yet keep that promise but also with the consolation that if he accomplishes nothing else, “at least the media will be totally discredited.”

In sum, if you seek a detailed eye- and ear-catching review of news stories that have been misreported, distorted, or conveniently ignored due to Trump Derangement Syndrome, Resistance is Futile is the book for you.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle 

Dinesh D'Souza Versus Critics of DEATH OF A NATION

Rule of thumb: If Rotten Tomatoes and most movie critics hate a political flick, it must be good!  One of those critics who hangs out at the website RogerEbert.com deemed Dinesh D'Souza's latest film, Death of a Nation, so "shabbily constructed and artistically bankrupt" that it hardly "qualifies as a movie in the first place."  Peter Sobczynski doesn't deal seriously with the film's core assertions, which he cavalierly dismisses as "cherry-picked facts" garnished by "overt omissions." 

Those two terms do serve well, alongside "blatant distortions," as descriptions of Sobczynski's review.  D'Souza's movie, for example, compares Donald Trump to Abraham Lincoln only in certain respects, primarily as an American president who faces tremendous political hostility that once again threatens to divide the Union.  P.S. repeats a canard that D'Souza has repeatedly demolished, including in this film, that the parties "switched positions" with respect to civil rights in the 1960s.  This widely accepted misrepresentation ignores the fact that a greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the '64 Civil Rights bill (which was filibustered in the Senate by Southern Democrats) and that all but two of the hundreds of segregationist Dixiecrat legislators remained Democrats throughout their long careers, including former Klansman Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia.  D'Souza also notes that the Democrat George Wallace carried the Deep South in 1968, not Richard Nixon, whose Civil Rights initiatives are rigorously ignored by leftist historians and movie critics who incessantly push the "Southern strategy" narrative.

P.S. also ignores the boatload of historical cherries that clearly put Mussolini's fascism on the "left" or socialist side of the political spectrum and has nothing to say about its curious "right-wing" repositioning after World War II.  Hitler, like Mussolini, was a national socialist.  D'Souza provides in this film several additional "cherries" that illuminate the mutual admiration that existed for years between Mussolini and FDR, as well as a few nuggets that show embarrassing links between Germany's early Nazi years and Roosevelt's New Deal.  If P.S. has any intellectual curiosity about such things, it isn't communicated in his epithet-laden review.  For those individuals who might be interested, D'Souza provides reams of additional evidence about the leftist origins of fascism in his book The Big Lie.

Other "cherries" P.S. "overtly omits" from his review include the re-segregation of the White House by President Woodrow Wilson, that same Progressive Democrat's White House screening of D.W. Griffith's Klan-boosting The Birth of a Nation, and the blatantly racist aspects of Margaret Sanger's progressive eugenics-based organization, Planned Parenthood.  Needless to say, P.S. has nothing positive to say about Trump and adds for his mindless readers that D'Souza never mentions "the countless [unspecified] scandals surrounding the administration."   

From my own perspective, Death of a Nation does cover much of the material that was dealt with in D'Souza's prior films, but this "repetitious" objection doesn't seem to count against the hundreds of Watergate or McCarthy-era retellings that continue to titillate Democrats and the mainstream media.  Moreover, it certainly takes more than a few reiterations to drive home points that counter well established lies like "the parties switched in the '60s" and "fascism is on the right."  Another important point the film makes is that northern Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution that outlawed slavery and granted citizenship and voting rights to blacks.  Consequently, the Civil War was not just a war of North versus South, but, in some respects, a war of anti-slavery Republicans against pro-slavery (or anti-abolition) Democrats who resided in both the North and the South.  

A completely new component of D'Souza's recent film is his interview with a white supremacist leader, Richard Spencer, whose favorite presidents include the founder of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, and expansionist Democrat slave-owner James Polk.  Far from being a conservative, Spencer sees rights being bestowed on us by "the state" and not "by God or nature."  P.S. writes in his review that D'Souza "twists things around" to get Spencer to say "I guess I'm a Progressive," but what D'Souza actually does is point out how Spencer's political beliefs coincide with the state-centered philosophy of Progressivism.  The mainstream media portray Spencer as a leader of the "Alt-Right" animated by President Trump, who, despite media claims, has actually pursued a non-state-centered agenda. 

For those of us who have seen D'Souza's prior films, Death of a Nation may seem like more of the same, even if "the same" is stuff that's essential to the nation's survival.  For those who aren't familiar with D'Souza's work, Death of a Nation could be a revelatory moment that turns their political world upside-down.  At the very least, for those folks whose minds are at all open, it can be an invitation to explore whether ideas that most folks take for granted are actually true – and if they aren't true, how and by whom those lies came to be propagated.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is available on Kindle.

We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, by Jason Hill

We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People, by Jason Hill, Bombardier Books, New York, July 10, 2018 (192 pages, $19.07 Hardcover, $9.99 Kindle)

One can scarcely imagine the ideological venom generated among leftists by a well-spoken black professor with a doctorate in philosophy who has the temerity to make public statements like these: “Americans as a group of people are good people.  But hatred of the good for being good … has become a fashionable emotion among certain elitist groups who resent America and her people for such virtues.”  “America in the 21^st century is one essentially free of racial, ethnical, and religious clashes and violence among all her varied peoples.”  “America is a place of universal belonging. It is the prototype of what a benevolent universe looks like … It celebrates civic nationalism as the political principle that would forge a common identity among strangers and foreigners from disparate parts of the globe.”  “[A]n insidious cottage-industry of victimology [is] often predicated on black suffering and white guilt, guilt for past transgressions that whites have long atoned for as a group.”

If even a third of America’s black citizens shared the views of Jason Hill, a 1985 Jamaican immigrant to this country, the Democrat Party as currently constituted would not exist.   Consequently, Hill and black Americans with similar views are despised and vilified by “compassionate” Dems and by blacks who’ve embraced the “victim” status assigned to them by “alt-left” politicians and academicians like Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is how Professor Hill puts it: “Hell...hath no greater fury like a far-left-winger rejected for his or her redemptive gestures….  Because if the moral meaning and purpose of your existence as a far-left liberal rests on my suffering and victimization as a black person, then you will need me to suffer indefinitely in order to continue to cull some meaning and purpose from your life.” 

Beyond being labeled a traitor to his race, Hill suffered professionally for his non-racial, self-reliant, capitalist beliefs in the corrupt halls of academia.  In that setting Hill struggled mightily for admission to numerous graduate schools (despite having excellent qualifications) and was ultimately denied tenure by his “far-left, postmodern, Marxist-infected” colleagues (despite possessing a sterling teaching and publication record). Fortunately, this essentially “racist” decision for the “uppity” black professor was overturned by the university’s president who was, uncharacteristically, “a huge fan” of Hill’s work.

Adding fuel to the fire of leftist hatred is this hard-to-refute argument: “I adduce my own life as evidence of the utter nonsense of this [minorities-as-victims] narrative.”  That life included interactions with countless whites in and around Stone Mountain, Georgia -- an area once considered (and by leftists still considered) Klan country.  Here in the late-80s Caribbean families bought homes and conversed with neighbors “in utter fearlessness.”   “None of us ever missed a night’s sleep,” Hill notes.  Indeed, his grandmother went to an all-white church, “and soon she was its most beloved parishioner.”

In addition to his own experience, Hill relates with sympathy the stories of many non-white immigrant friends.  Dinesh, for example, was an “untouchable” in his native India but was “embraced as an equal” by Hill’s friends, a group that included “foreigners from all over the world” as well as white Southerners.  Hill provides the most detail when discussing the success story of Thai, a young Vietnamese man who couldn’t speak English but who, with the help of his friends, was able to learn enough of the language to gain admission to Georgia State University and later to open his own restaurant.  Thai, who ultimately graduated magna cum laude, accomplished all this with no help from his family in Vietnam -- “illiterate peasants too poor even to visit.”

Countless stories like Thai’s refute the assertion by black academicians like Ta-Nehisi Coates that the American Dream is an illusion -- that it is not only unattainable for blacks and immigrants but also a denial of their true cultural selves.  In a touching episode near the book’s end, Hill contacts Thai by phone twenty years later and is “shocked to hear the American twang in his accent.”  Thai, who made additional money in the stock market and real estate, had sold his “three restaurants” and moved to Los Angeles to be closer to his grandchildren.  All this success occurred after his first restaurant failed. When asked by Hill what he now thought about America, Thai replied, “America has brought me where I am.  I can’t imagine a world without, you know, this place.”  So much for Ta-Nehisi Coates and his America-hating cohorts.  

Hill’s love for America has as its logical corollary a passionate hatred for America’s corrupt universities.  “The biggest breach in this country,” Hill declares, “is not between blacks and whites.  It is between the intellectuals and the people.”  Put more succinctly, “The American professoriat hates America!”  Consequently, the author boldly declares a remedy that would do wonders were it actually implemented: “The solution is not just to defund the American humanities and social science departments in current universities, but to also shut them down entirely and rebuild them from scratch.”  Beyond seeking the unlikely defunding of these institutions by the government and alumni, Hill’s “rebuild from scratch” prescription appears to be, for all its rhetorical merit, a Dream too far. 

Overall, Hill’s book is marvelous for its use of personal details to bolster profound psycho-political insights. On occasions, however, the author’s academic language detracts from his mostly engrossing narrative.  This “scholarly” tilt often produces needlessly complex and extended formulations.  (The term “metaphysical,” for example, appears as a qualifier dozens of times.)  This problem unfortunately characterizes much of Hill’s introduction.  I would advise readers to skip all but the first few pages of that section and to read the intro in full after finishing the book.  One other problem I had was the insertion of material where Hill describes, with poetic sensitivity to be sure, his own battle with suicide -- a struggle that was not linked clearly to any professional or political issues and had a familial precedent.

That said, Hill’s book is well worth reading for its glowing tribute to America, its penetrating insight into the essentially racist mentality of the left, and its concrete examples of these two conclusions.     

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle 

Golf's Latest Sacrificial Victim

Brittany Lincicome is the latest sacrificial lamb to be offered on the altar of gender equality.  This talented and successful professional golfer on the LPGA tour was thrown last week into the lion's den of men's professional golf.  The result at the Barbasol Open near Lexington, Kentucky was predictable but will doubtless be spun in the direction gender ideologues insist on.

Lincicome failed to make the cut, finishing five over par after two rounds.  The cut (consisting of the top seventy players and ties) was at two under par.  ESPN's stable of P.C. clowns (which now includes the "worst person in the world," Keith Olbermann) will doubtless note that her second round was under par and that she did better than a dozen male golfers.  Omitted from their reportage will be the fact that the leading score after two rounds was fifteen under par (twenty strokes better than Lincicome) and that some of the guys she "beat" actually had lower scores but withdrew from the competition when it was obvious they wouldn't be around the following rain-delayed day.  Two other males she bested (while the top PGA players struggled overseas) were fifty-three and fifty-seven years of age.

No one should doubt that Lincicome is a good golfer and a superb female golfer.  I am sure she would beat me by a dozen strokes on almost any course, but then so would almost any good high school golfer.  The issue here isn't whether some female athletes can beat many or even most men.  It's why folks in elite media and corporate ivory towers keep putting female golfers in positions where they are certain to fail – at least by the standards applied to male golfers. 

That last clause is critical.  No male golfer would be touted for failing to make a cut and finishing near the bottom of his fellow competitors.  But whenever a female "accomplishes" this feat, P.C. prima donnas with microphones hail another "shattering of the glass ceiling."  Ignored in all this virtue-signaling is the glass-shattering damage that might be done by throwing good athletes into competition that's above their heads – an unintended consequence that also applies to many affirmative action placements.  More importantly, elites ignore the profound social damage that's done by pretending males and females are equal in every respect. 

Poor Michelle Wie was almost destroyed by the P.C. rush to prove she was as good as any male golfer, an ideologically fueled imperative that led to a string of eight missed cuts (with increasingly poor scores) that started in 2004 when Michelle was a mere fourteen years old and ended four years later.  Fortunately, the great Annika Sorenstam had already established her Hall of Fame credentials with dozens of LPGA and European wins when she missed the cut at Fort Worth's Colonial tournament in 2003 – a result that didn't deter P.C. enthusiasts from insisting on their nature-be-damned beliefs with young Miss Wie.

The fundamental mendacity that permeates "gender equality" lunacy is illustrated by the taglines that accompany Babe Zaharias's forays into men's golf.  A tremendous multi-sport Olympic medalist, Mrs. Zaharias (née Didrikson) made the 36-hole cut at the L.A. Open but failed to make the 54-hole cut.  She is nevertheless hailed as "the only woman to make the cut in a PGA Tour event."  Never mind that in January of 1945, there was this thing called World War II going on and that Zaharias's score of twenty-three over par after three rounds was hardly stellar.  Moreover, at that time, the L.A. Open, according to the Golf Historical Society, "was not a regular tour event, and was played for War Bonds by both professionals and a sprinkling of amateurs."   

A PGA website, "The history of women playing in men's PGA Tour events," further misleads folks by observing that Zaharias also "made the cut" in 1945 at Phoenix and Tucson.  In fact, though Zaharias "qualified" for these War Bond tournaments, the Arizona Daily Star's 2006 historical retrospective of the Tucson event noted, "The Babe finished 39 shots off the lead, but ahead of five men in the 47-player field."  Joining in the mendacity, an online Phoenix magazine observed that Zaharias "made the cut" in the Phoenix Open and finished thirty-third, failing to add that "thirty-third" (in a field of unknown size) amounted to being thirty strokes behind the eventual winner, Byron Nelson.

We are all supposed to nod our heads and pretend, along with our progressive betters, that these "accomplishments" prove that women can do anything men can do – and do it just as well.  So if a 29-year-old Billie Jean King beats a 55-year-old has-been, Bobby Riggs, this result presumably indicates some kind of equality of the sexes.  (I had forgotten that Riggs had just demolished Margaret Court, who, as even a P.C. "Battle of the Sexes" website puts it, "was in the midst of a career that produced more Grand Slam singles titles than any other player – man or woman.")  This "man or woman" coda is now ubiquitous among sport commentators, implicitly declaring that any accomplishment in women's sports is equal to any accomplishment in men's sports – an assumption that works as long as fans are dutifully aware of their P.C. obligations and the sport in question doesn't involve stopwatches, weightlifting, or specific distances like shot-putting.

Just once I would like to see a female officer on "Cops" take down a large male suspect like Lt. Benson regularly does on "Law and Order."  Unfortunately, in the military and various other occupations for which upper body strength is crucial, Hollywood fantasy doesn't reflect the real world.  Perhaps when some girl gets severely injured playing football with the guys, folks may wake up to the obvious truth, but I doubt it.  Instead, they'll focus on football's violence while sticking their P.C. heads in the "gender equality" sand and dreaming of a future in which male-female distinctions are a thing of the past. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is available on Kindle.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/golfs_latest_sacrificial_victim.html#ixzz5MC8Q6GBL

12 RULES FOR LIFE: AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS by Jordan Peterson Touchstone Book Review

Dr. Jordan Peterson has recently been all over TV and the Internet making a number of courageous, politically incorrect observations. The comment that has most driven the PC crowd to distraction is the now heretical claim that boys and girls are actually different both physically and psychologically—an assertion that the self-proclaimed party of science doubts in spite of evidence that has been “settled” for at least half a century.

       Now comes Peterson’s new book, 12 Rules for Life—a work that not only provides extensive evidence of how the sexes differ but also gives “progressives” even more reasons for conducting hate sessions against the Canadian psychologist. Among the author’s PC transgressions is his trenchant protest against know-it-all ideologues who ought to put their own houses in order before criticizing the world. Peterson notes that beneath a pose of limitless compassion these self-styled savants typically exhibit personal psychological aberrations detectable in their adherence to utopian belief systems that subject existing reality to constant criticism.

       Part and parcel of this ideologically fed self-deception is a hatred of tradition, a lack of gratitude to one’s forebears, and an unwillingness to listen to anyone who doesn’t reflect one’s own views. To the great chagrin of leftists, Peterson repeatedly cites the disastrous and murderous failures of communism to illustrate these points. His comments about the destructive unwillingness to tolerate dissent would have been even more cogent, however, if he had aimed them directly at academic dogmatists and college snowflakes who fail to acknowledge that “the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” Another obvious but neglected target of this principle would be the “climate change” ideologues.

Wisdom from the Lion’s Den

       Here is a sampling of the many worthwhile observations proffered by Peterson in his book: (1) The “insistence that all gender differences are socially constructed” is “insane.” (2) Ideas that are “new and radical” are “almost always wrong.” (3) “To think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous.” Furthermore, “there isn’t a shred of hard evidence . . . that Western society is pathologically patriarchal” or “that the prime lesson of history is that men, rather than nature, were the primary source of the oppression of women.” (Five-minute PC hate session to follow!) (4) “It took untold generations to get you where you are.  A little gratitude might be in order.” (5) “Parents should come in pairs” because it is incredibly difficult to raise children alone. (6) “Children in father-absent homes are four times as likely to be poor” and “twice as likely to commit suicide” as children whose fathers are present and active in the home. (7) Hierarchies are pervasive in nature. Thus, human hierarchies are inevitable and not necessarily oppressive since “the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy.” (8) Evil is real. Some actions are “intrinsically terrible” and “run counter to the proper nature of  human Being.” (9) Columbine murderer Eric Harris simply took to its practical conclusion 
David Attenborough’s spectacularly egotistical ecological judgment that humans are a “plague”on the planet and the Club of Rome’s view that humanity is a “cancer” within nature.

       These observations, which have made Peterson a folk hero in some quarters and a reactionary villain in others, aren’t among the specific “rules” that comprise the book’s twelve chapters, but are comments made within those chapters. The rules themselves, which form the chapter titles, Peterson drew largely from problems he confronted in his clinical work. Here are the first three:
Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you. As these examples show, 12 Rules for Life contains many poignant observations—backed by scientific evidence, as well as the author’s professional interactions and personal experience—that run counter to the politically correct nostrums that permeate our culture.

A Few Caveats

       Readers should be aware, however, of the verbal terrain they often must traverse to arrive at these gems. Chapter one, for example, begins with a lengthy description of lobster and wren territoriality, only one of a number of socio-biological detours the reader will be sent on throughout the book. Moreover, Peterson often gives extended Jungian interpretations to biblical stories and religious symbols—a fact that might lead a reader to wonder whether, for the author, God has been reduced to little more than a psychological abstraction.

       Nevertheless, if readers are able to overlook a lack of conciseness and to
embrace the much-neglected “rule” of actually listening to someone who isn’t an
intellectual clone of themselves, they will find Dr. Peterson’s book well worth perusing.
After all, a good man is often recognized by the enemies he makes.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy:
“Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle.

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/issue.php?id=209

Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell

“Just the facts, ma’am.”  That was Joe Friday’s interrogation refrain on Dragnet.  The same comment could serve as the sub-title of Thomas Sowell’s recent book, Discrimination and Disparities.  Few works focused on politically explosive topics maintain such a consistent focus on empirical evidence while avoiding rhetorical jabs at opponents.  On the other hand, empirical evidence cuts deep, especially when critics can’t protest the author’s “nasty” style. As radio talker Larry Elder observes, “Facts are to liberals what kryptonite is to Superman.”

Sowell’s title, if employed by a member of the leftist intelligentsia, would doubtless imply a causal link between statistical disparities and some form of discrimination--usually racial. Sowell, by contrast, marshals an abundance of evidence to show that this automatic assumption isn’t justified.  Focusing simply on statistical probabilities, Sowell notes that if five prerequisites are needed for success in a particular field, and if the chances are two out of three that any person will have each characteristic, the chance of possessing all five characteristics is still only one in eight--a calculation that helps explain why most pro golfers have never won a PGA tournament while Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods have collectively won over 200 times.  Consequently, “Given multiple prerequisites for many human endeavors, we should not be surprised if economic or social advances are not evenly or randomly distributed among individuals, groups, institutions or nations at any given time.”

Among leftists, however, assumptions about the random distribution of characteristics stand at the heart of various discrimination suits.  Thus, if proportionately more blacks than whites are given tickets for speeding, this statistic provides for them prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.  Sowell, however, offers clear counter-evidence that black drivers are more likely to exceed the speed limit than white drivers.  Similarly, the assumption that racial discrimination is the primary reason blacks are overrepresented in the prison system is countered by noting that blacks are vastly overrepresented as both perpetrators and victims of murder--a crime that’s hard to ignore.  Sowell further observes that fatherlessness clearly increases the likelihood that a person will end up in prison since a majority of prisoners “were raised with either one parent or no parent” --a domestic circumstance that applies to well over half of all black kids in the U.S.  

In short, Sowell shows that many or most of the disparities that afflict black Americans are due to behaviors to which even other blacks have objected.  In the early twentieth century, for example, long-time black residents in Chicago publicly chastened new arrivals from the South for behaviors that would, and eventually did, have negative repercussions for the entire community.  Today, however, most black leaders ignore the plain fact that merchants in high crime areas, for example, must charge higher prices to squeeze out lower profits than stores in safer parts of town--preferring to blame the proprietors’ racist-fueled greed. Only blacks who’ve moved to safer suburbs can be counted on to protest  government policies that again place large groups of unsavory characters near them under the failed assumption that a middle class environment will alter bad habits.     

Sowell also provides surprising examples of cases where the desire for profit actually won out over racial discrimination.  Early in the twentieth century, for instance, attempts to maintain a white Harlem were foiled by the sheer economic advantages available to landlords who ignored the neighborhood’s segregation policy.  Likewise, privately owned municipal transit groups and railroads both protested and often ignored laws that mandated segregated facilities.  Indeed, railroad management actively worked with Homer Plessy to overturn segregation mandates in that industry--a legal effort that ended unsuccessfully with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision in 1896.  Amazingly, Sowell shows how the profit motive often trumped segregation laws or compacts even in apartheid South Africa and in the post-bellum South.  Put succinctly, it was racist politicians, not transit owners, who insisted that Rosa Parks sit at the back of the bus.

Sowell focuses additional attention on well-intended government policies that succeeded in increasing, not decreasing, racial disparities.  In this regard significant space is devoted to the negative consequences of minimum wage legislation.  Sowell notes that in 1948, when the minimum wage was economically inconsequential, black teen unemployment was actually lower than white teen unemployment and a fraction of its rate when the minimum wage was substantially increased.  Sowell also laments the destruction of a traditionally stellar black educational institution, Dunbar High School in Washington D.C., when self-sorting, education-focused black families and students were subjected to politically-driven and empirically-destructive fantasies that involved bussing and the abolition of selective institutions like Dunbar.

Similarly, in order to racially “unsort” neighborhoods (as they “unsorted” schools) politicians ignored economic facts that explained why banks (including black-owned banks) disproportionately rejected blacks’ mortgage applications.  Instead, legislators insisted that financial institutions lower lending standards to achieve the politically desired “random” racial distribution of house ownership--a misbegotten policy whose economic chickens came home to roost in 2009.  Meanwhile, various government laws that decreased the supply of housing and increased prices were “successful” at reducing the Bay Area’s black population in 2005 to less than half its number in 1970.

Throughout the book Sowell discusses a number of other factors that clearly lead to “disparities,” leaving aside the kneejerk assumption of racist motives.  Being first-born or an only child, for example, has immense advantages, benefits indicated by the fact that twenty-two of the twenty-nine original Apollo astronauts fell into one of those two categories. Additionally, in a chapter titled “The World of Numbers” the author debunks several beliefs about disparities that are rooted in false assumptions about statistics and the lack of economic mobility.  Thus, one study found that 95% of the people in the bottom income quintile were no longer there fifteen years later and that 29% of them had risen to the top quintile.  Elsewhere Sowell explains how falling “household” incomes are consistent with rising “personal” incomes simply because the average size of a household has fallen substantially.  (A two-person household where each individual earns $20,000 represents a household income of $40,000.  But if both members of the household begin to earn $30,000 and establish separate residences, the income of each one-person household is now 25% below what it was before.)

Much of Sowell’s book is recapitulated in his final chapter--and with a bit more rhetorical intensity than previously exhibited.  A few new topics, however, like the destructive consequences of a grievance mentality and “black English,” are also addressed.  

Overall, Sowell’s book is a protest against the unfounded assumption that “there would be no disparate outcomes unless there were disparate treatment.”  Sowell observes that this ideologically-driven assumption “seems almost impervious to evidence.”  Accordingly, those who cling to this dogma with religious fervor will likely avoid Sowell’s fact-filled book like kryptonite.  Folks with less dogmatic proclivities, however, would do well to peruse this concise work.   

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle .

THE BLACK REDNECK VERSION OF “RESPECT”

“You can’t give respect unless you get it first.”  That was the ethical maxim presented to me over a decade ago by a young black high-schooler. The assertion possesses a superficial plausibility that attends so many pop-cultural aphorisms—like the bogus observation that folks can’t love others unless they first love themselves. It would have been nice had the student put forward his dictum in my class as a topic for reflection.  Instead, the saying was proffered in a hallway as justification for the chip he carried on his shoulder toward a classmate.   

Fortunately, as an ethics instructor I was able to offer what I considered a convincing refutation of his  motto by asking the young man to envision a room full of strangers all demanding respect of everyone else because, “You can’t give respect unless you get it first.” Under this not-so-implausible scenario, a simple meet and greet is transformed into a confrontational game of “respect chicken.” “You respect me first.” “No way!  You respect me first.” No individual can respect anyone else because he or she hasn’t “first” been respected by the others. The issue at the center of this interpersonal standoff revolves around the term “first”—with one party required to submit to another and offer respect without “first” having received it. Clearly, what’s at stake here isn’t mutual respect but rather establishing a pecking order that’s akin to kissing Godfather’s ring.

By contrast, the traditional moral view is that all persons should be afforded respect unless there is some good reason not to do so.  And even in the latter circumstance, politeness is, with few exceptions, the default position. The cultural basis for this practice is largely religious—grounded in the belief that all persons are created in God’s image, though one could also argue for mutual respect on philosophical (e.g. Kantian) grounds. What interests me, however, is the cultural genesis of my student’s faux-maxim. Where did he come up with this very flawed vision of respect?

In the last half-century “respect” became a very important term in black communities and especially in what is colloquially called “the hood”—neighborhoods characterized by broken families, substandard housing, and a degree of violence most Americans would find appalling. In this milieu being “respected” came to be associated more with being feared than with being the by-product of respectable behavior. Gang leaders, for example, were “respected” because of the terror they instilled in subordinates and the power they possessed to do as they pleased.

Not being “respected” thus became a challenge to one’s manhood akin to the “it’s on” or “you’ve been served” idioms. The idea that receiving respect implied acting with reasonable concern toward others was lost thanks to a survivalist environment and innumerable media images that glorified this misbegotten vision of black life via tough guy stereotypes like those made famous by Samuel L. Jackson. Meanwhile, morally condescending white liberals reinforced hip-hop and gangsta-rap perversions of civility by hailing them as authentic expressions of “black” or “African-American” culture.  Thus, these self-appointed moral mandarins succeeded, as Thomas Sowell ironically describes in his book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, in saddling blacks with a violence-soaked, respect-me-first identity akin to the racist Southern culture they had struggled against for centuries and whose origins can be traced back to the Scottish highlands.

In short, like millions of other young persons (not just African-Americans), my aggrieved student had been indoctrinated by an incestuous cadre of Hollywood, New York, and D.C. elites in an ethical formula that’s guaranteed to produce violent confrontations and resentment. What better way to keep that large cohort of individuals perpetually dissatisfied, mostly marginalized, and overwhelmingly Democrat!  

     

  

Harvey Weinstein, Socialism, and Mass Murder

“The frivolity of evil” -- that’s the phrase coined by British author and physician to the poor, Theodore Dalrymple.  The words appear in his 2005 book, Our Culture: What’s Left of It.  Dalrymple’s analysis of the precipitous decline of British society provides a salient response to the “motive” question that currently permeates our media in the wake of the “senseless” murders in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs.  

Dalrymple’s professional life as a psychiatrist working almost exclusively with prisoners and England’s underclass gave him a perspective miles apart from shrinks who massage the egos of celebrities and millionaires on New York’s Upper East Side.  Dalrymple (nee, Anthony Daniels) actually has the temerity to focus on the self-destructive actions of his patients and especially on their abysmal family lives.

Dalrymple speaks of “the frivolity of evil” (a telling modification of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”) to fit the self-conscious actions of women whose serial romantic choices condemn both themselves and their luckless children to neglect, assault, and rape.   The same applies to aimless, drug-addled men who, without compunction, sire children by various women and thus multiply the number of souls who’ll endure the same paternal abandonment they themselves curse.  

When considering why such irresponsible behavior has become endemic in Britain, Dalrymple points in two directions -- first, toward a welfare structure that undermines personal responsibility and even rewards irresponsible choices.  In this system mothers without husbands or employment are set up by the government with housing, food, and enough money to focus on something that gives their lives meaning.  Often that something revolves around romance and domestic trauma -- even at the expense of their children.

If one asks why the government supports this dysfunctional system, that query points in another direction, toward intellectuals and their cohorts in the media, including “novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers.” According to this mélange of moral miscreants, the poor must be viewed as victims who aren’t responsible for their actions.  External factors such as poverty, “food deserts,” and capitalism are seen as the true culprits -- an analysis that bolsters the ego of nonjudgmental elites and places ever more power in the hands of government officials, therapists, and social activists “who have themselves come to form a powerful vested interest of dependence on the government.”   

Moreover, these benefits showered on the poor are seen as theirs “by right.”  Thus, no moral stigma attends failure to make personal choices that would secure these basic benefits, and no government is so callous as to suggest that most folks should care for themselves. 

In addition to these beliefs, intellectuals and their media cohorts have embraced the notion that the elimination of taboos constitutes the royal road to personal and social Nirvana.  In the world of entertainment, I note, this process is uncritically hailed as “pushing the envelope” -- where taboos like cursing, adultery, drug use, and ever-increasing depictions of violence and sexual perversity fall by the wayside.  Dalrymple observes that “the prestige intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to non-intellectuals.  What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient -- the very people most in need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement.”

Instead of obligations, especially to one’s children, emotional self-fulfillment becomes the primary basis for action.  After all, as the popular saying goes, “How can you love others unless you first love yourself?” Ignored in this self-destructive psychological calculus is the fact that self-respect derives precisely from fulfilling one’s obligations.

My conclusion:  Who better in contemporary American society to symbolize the philosophy of taboo-breaking than a member of the media establishment who embodies the very antinomianism he disseminates constantly to the general public -- namely, Harvey Weinstein.  And lest we dismiss Weinstein as an anomaly, let us not forget the standing ovation given at the Academy Awards to child rapist Roman Polanski.  

In an environment where personal responsibility is undermined by Socialist dogma and where intellectuals and their media groupies constantly tout the elimination of taboos, is it any wonder that some folks (as in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs) will take these beliefs and actions to their logical destructive conclusions.

I’m not responsible.  Others are the reason for my failures and disappointments.  Child rape is now ok. Harvey Weinstein got away with all kinds of illegal acts.  Society owes me.  Now “society” is going to pay for my misery -- Quentin Tarantino style!   

 

A culture with over a million abortions each year and illegitimacy rates well north of 70% in some communities shouldn’t have to scratch its head when mass murders occur.  Intellectuals and media powerbrokers, however, never look at the destruction their ideas and actions have wrought.  If they did, “they might feel called upon to place restraints upon their own behavior” or give up the cherished notion of their moral superiority.  Consequently, “neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face.” 

Nuclear families that eat together and acknowledge legitimate obligations and reasonable moral boundaries are what hold a society together.  Socialism, intellectuals, and Harvey Weinsteins in the media pull it apart -- sometimes violently.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle . This article appeared in American Thinker Magazine (online), 

11-12-17.

Book Review -- The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D’Souza,

Nazism and fascism are “right wing” movements -- the polar political opposites of socialism.  Fascists and Nazis employ appeals to traditional morality to gain support.   Progressives deplore fascism and always have.  Fascists support capitalism. Trump is a fascist.  These are aspects of The Big Lie that Dinesh D’Souza exposes in his recently released book.

The absurd claim that fascism and Nazism are not socialist movements owes it origin to the hideous reputations those leftist regimes earned after World War II.  How could progressives expect to thrive in America if the Holocaust and other atrocities were linked to its political relatives?  Consequently, a gigantic lie was perpetrated by leftist intellectuals and slavishly spread by a sympathetic media -- namely, that fascism was a movement of the “far right” and that conservatives were also on “the right.”  This “big lie” has long been a staple of Democrat propaganda and the basis for the absurd notion that President Trump is a fascist -- not his violent, GOP-assassinating, speech-suppressing, “Antifa” opponents   

Most conservatives are aware of links between fascism and socialism.  After all, the term “Nazi” refers to a “National Socialist” party.  What many of them, and certainly most Americans, don’t know, thanks to a mendacious media and institutions of advanced deception, are the countless ties (centralized government, racism, eugenics, state-sanctioned violence, and enforced cultural uniformity) that link fascists and even Nazis to the progressive movement. 

Indeed, a mutual admiration relationship existed between Mussolini and FDR -- a romance evidenced not only by a White House-organized ticker-tape parade for Mussolini’s aviation minister, but also by New Deal policies like the National Recovery Administration that effectively put the American economy under Roosevelt’s dictatorial control.  Not surprisingly, a New York Times journalist praised FDR for following Mussolini’s example -- though the Supreme Court, not yet cowed by FDR’s later fascistic court-packing threat, did not cheer this unconstitutional power grab.  

In 1933, FDR himself said of Mussolini, “There seems no question he is really interested in what we are doing and I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished…”  Mussolini, for his part, was thrilled to be called “the Italian Roosevelt.”  Even more surprising to Americans weaned on “the big lie” is the fact that Germany’s Nazi press frequently praised FDR in the early 30s.  One magazine lauded “the fascist New Deal” in which the central government (as in fascism) exercised substantial control over “private” industry and finance.  

Fascism itself, as D’Souza explains, arose due to the spectacular failure of Marx’s predictions about proletarian revolutions.  Mussolini and Lenin, both Marxists, proposed different reasons for this failure, but both remained socialists dedicated to centralized government and totalitarian societies.  Thus, the bloody feud between fascism and communism was an internecine war akin to the ongoing hostilities between Sunni and Shiite sects within Islam.     

D’Souza’s work contains a fair amount of material also found in Jonah Goldberg’s less strident book, Liberal Fascism -- especially information about the “proto-fascist” proclivities of the Constitution-despising Woodrow Wilson under whose resegregated regime the “domestic terrorist arm of the Democratic Party,” the KKK, reemerged in spectacular fashion.  The Big Lie, however, goes beyond Goldberg by linking Progressivism to Nazism via their kindred eugenics-based racist beliefs.  D’Souza notes, for example, that Hitler’s anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws were explicitly patterned after Democrat-instituted segregation and anti-miscegenation laws in the South and that progressives in America “outpaced the Nazis in initiating mass programs of forced incarceration and forced sterilization…”

D’Souza also fully addresses a question I posed to Mr. Goldberg after a book lecture in San Diego -- to which question I received an unsatisfactory answer: “How did it come to pass that fascism is commonly called ‘rightwing’?”  To this query The Big Lie provides a detailed response.  The leftist historian Richard Hofstadter began this project by linking Social Darwinism in America to capitalism -- thus transferring racist eugenics from its progressive spawning ground to the conservative “right.”  Two Germans émigrés from the Marxist Frankfort School, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, subsequently developed the big lie that fascism wasn’t so much a political philosophy as a personality disorder associated with morally repressed conformists and traditional religious folk.  In short, fascism became an “authoritarian” neurosis rooted in conservative sentiments.

Never mind that Hitler was a bohemian who despised Christianity, that Mussolini was an atheist, or that fascists hoped to create a new society filled with “supermen” and not suburbanites lounging in hot tubs.  Ignore also the fact that fascism is a political philosophy with a background that’s been erased by the primary practitioners of the big lie -- academia, the media, and Hollywood.  According to D’Souza, fascism’s philosophical founder was Giovanni Gentile, an Italian who, like Mussolini after him, moved from Marxism to fascism. Most of Gentile’s program could easily be mistaken for any recent Democrat platform.   

D’Souza correctly, in my view, sees the “resistance” to Trump as a grave threat designed to undo America’s constitutional system and to institute a progressive conformity of thought and action throughout the country -- a uniformity that is already being enforced by fascistic thuggery and intimidation at Berkeley, Middlebury College, and elsewhere.  Unfortunately, talking conservative heads seem largely oblivious to this clear and present danger.

D’Souza’s concluding “Denazification” suggestions, however, don’t inspire confidence.   How does one pass Trump’s economic agenda, reach out to minorities, prosecute Obama-era abuses of power, or develop alternative media and entertainment resources in today’s social and political environment?  While D’Souza has been successful with his documentaries, one would think it will take decades to make serious inroads into the left’s academic and media dominance.  We might not have that much time.  Nevertheless, D’Souza has provided conservatives with substantial ammunition.  They need not simply scream out the window, “I’m as mad as hell…”  They can also tweet, message associates, and vigorously assert to whoever will listen, “Fascism and progressivism are both leftist, socialist disasters! Read this book!”             

 Regnery Publishing, July 31, 2017 (256 pages, $17.99, Hardcover) 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle .

MORAL ILLITERACY by Richard Kirk (Amazon Kindle)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713Y4VMM

Most Americans are now morally illiterate—incapable of engaging in serious moral analysis. Exhibit A in favor of this proposition is the frequency with which the rhetorical challenge, "Who's to say what's right or wrong?" is used to shut down moral discussion--and then met with confused silence by the question's victim. The first chapter of this book provides a succinct and convincing reply to that challenge. Subsequent chapters analyze other comments designed to avoid serious moral reflection--statements like the following: "It's just entertainment," "Ethics is really personal," "I gotta be me," "Be true to what you believe." The substitution of the term "value" for "virtue" and the modern redefinition of the term "hypocrisy" are additional linguistic shell games that have contributed to Americans' inability and unwillingness to engage in meaningful moral discourse. The former change makes possible the morality-negating declaration that one is "entitled to his own values," while the latter disposes of the no-longer-popular aphorism, "Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice gives to virtue." A concluding chapter explains "What went wrong?" and points an accusing finger at the electronic traveling salesmen who replaced the moral guides who provided most of our ethical instruction prior to the advent of mass electronic communication. This changing of the moral guard is an immensely important and little-discussed cultural event that substituted advertisers, celebrities, and media movers and shakers for the ministers, parents, and persons of character who traditionally provided the lion's share of moral messaging in actual communities. The philosophical roots of our nation's moral illiteracy are also discussed briefly in this work, but these comments do not by any stretch of the imagination constitute a ponderous philosophical lecture. On the other hand, individuals who find moral discourse quite distasteful, will find the contents of this book hard to swallow.

My Review of "Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer"

Not since Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann has there been a more provocative analysis of evil as that provided in Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s work detailing the crimes, trial, and personality of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”

“Banality” was the word Arendt chose for Eichmann’s bureaucratic officiousness in the Third Reich’s Ministry of Death.  That term, however, hardly fits the acts of a self-assured abortionist who regularly snipped the spinal cords of babies born alive, kept infants’ feet as trophies, ran an illegal prescription drug mill, and hired assistants who were totally unqualified to perform medical duties in a filthy, ramshackle facility.  What’s surprising about Gosnell, however, is that his greed and macabre callousness existed alongside an often cheerful disposition that accompanied various acts of charity.  Consequently, Gosnell had a good reputation among most of the poor community he both served and exploited.

Additionally, the authors’ prison interview with Gosnell gives the impression of a self-confident individual with at least moderate intellectual and artistic talent -- a man with a positive outlook on the future who enjoyed traveling abroad, namedropping (a friend of slain late-term abortionist, George Tiller), and playing Chopin on the piano.  Nevertheless, Gosnell clearly overestimated his professional and intellectual abilities as indicated by his desire to represent himself in the trial at which he was ultimately found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison -- a sentence the doctor is confident will one day be overturned.

The term “banality” does comport, however, with the lassitude and indifference displayed by Pennsylvania’s abortion-oversight bureaucracy --  whose officials were all too willing to forego inspections, let gross violations slide, and dismiss even complaints associated with the deaths of two women Gosnell treated.  Pennsylvania’s pro-choice Republican governor, Tom Ridge, comes in for special criticism by the authors for his “hands-off” policy vis-à-vis facility inspections -- though they also note that the state’s bureaucratic malfeasance extended well beyond Ridge’s tenure.   

Accordingly, Gosnell’s late-term abortion house of horrors was exposed not by folks charged with the responsibility of making abortions “safe,” but rather by a cop investigating the source of some illegal prescription drugs.  The unsanitary conditions in Gosnell’s Women’s Medical Society

clinic -- e.g. cat feces, urine stench, milk jugs stuffed with aborted baby parts -- raised enough concerns to begin a probe of Gosnell’s “official” practice. 

The death of another patient opened additional investigatory doors.  This immigrant from Bhutan (mislabeled “the Indian woman” by Gosnell) had the misfortune of being heavily anesthetized by one of Gosnell’s unqualified assistants who took orders over the phone from the absent doctor.  Lies told by Gosnell and his staff about the treatment of Karnamaya Mongar didn’t deflect Detective Jim Wood and district attorneys from finally attempting to determine how far Gosnell had gone beyond the illegal distribution of prescription drugs.

Eventually the prosecution brought seven murder charges against Gosnell for killing live babies plus another charge for Mongar’s death.  Though the practice of “snipping” the spinal cords of late-term babies was common at Gosnell’s clinic, the prosecution required clear evidence that infants long since deceased had actually been alive before being murdered.  However, since there was no other logical reason for utilizing this unusual procedure on aborted fetuses, the authors estimate that Gosnell, who specialized in late-term abortions, killed “hundreds” and possibly “thousands” of live babies over the decades.

McElhinney and McAleer’s work provides an extensive account of Gosnell’s defense, presented by one of the state’s premier attorneys, Jack McMahon. McMahon’s cross examination of a prosecution witness who occasionally performed legal abortions at a prestigious hospital contains some of the most damning testimony in the book.  The defense lawyer argued skillfully that there is precious little difference between what Gosnell is accused of doing to live babies at his poor community facility and the legal approach to a live fetus (i.e. baby) after an attempted abortion in an upscale hospital.  In the halting words of a respected female physician, they would “just keep it warm you know.  It will eventually pass.”         

The book also highlights other legal absurdities.  In Pennsylvania, for example, it is legal to abort a fetus at 23 weeks and 6 days, even a minute before day 7, but it is a crime to carry out the same abortion a minute later -- a distinction akin to legally sucking the brain out of a baby a few inches before it exits the womb or illegally snipping its spinal cord moments later.  Ironically, Gosnell, who regularly manipulated ultrasound data to fit abortions within the state’s legal limit, appears to have believed Pennsylvania permitted abortions up to 24 and a half weeks, as his incomplete and often inaccurate records regularly noted the age of late-term fetuses as 24.5 weeks.

Given the brutal nature of late-term abortions, it’s hardly surprising that our pro-choice national press devoted minimal time to Gosnell’s trial.  After all, wall-to-wall coverage would doubtless raise profound questions about the morality of abortion and especially late-term abortions -- as it did with Gosnell’s pro-choice jury and the book’s once pro-choice author, Ann McElhinney.  Only a prominent USA Today editorial penned by The Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers prodded mainstream journalists into providing slightly more coverage.

This gripping and detailed book about Gosnell is a further attempt by McElhinny and McAleer to remedy that widespread media blackout.  In the near future the same husband-wife team will release a feature-length film to further publicize the largely suppressed truth about “America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”   

When one considers what this book reveals about the gruesome details, moral incoherence, and institutional trappings surrounding late-term abortions, it becomes easier to see how an arrogant, controlling doctor like Kermit Gosnell could continue for decades cheerfully snipping live babies’ spinal cords and committing medical malpractice on a grand scale.  After all, Gosnell is precisely the type of person who would be drawn to such a macabre specialty, all the while deeming his den of depravity a service to the community.     

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Cf. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/02/abortion_and_the_banality_of_evil.html

Abortion and the Banality of Evil

By Richard Kirk

Not since Hannah Arendt’s portrait of Adolf Eichmann has there been a more provocative analysis of evil as that provided in Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer’s [work] detailing the crimes, trial, and personality of Dr. Kermit Gosnell ...