Almost 2 years ago I offered my picks for “The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology” as my final case against the President before the election. These were the titles I selected and still recommend everyone read, today’s new list of 30 books is an expansion of this original list:
1. Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism by Stanley Kurtz
2. Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities by Stanley Kurtz
3. Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department by J. Christian Adams
4. Subversion, Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers by Matthew Vadum
5. The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley
6. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
7. Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
8. Barack Obama: The Story by David Maraniss
9. Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground by Jonathan Kay
10. Shariah: The Threat To America: An Exercise In Competitive Analysis (Report of Team B II)
11. The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America by Andrew C. McCarthy
12. Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin
13. Marxism: Philosophy and Economics by Thomas Sowell
14. Sex Rebel: Black, Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet by Bob Greene (pseudonym for Frank Marshall Davis)
15. Afrolantica Legacies by Derrick Bell
After summarizing some of the points from the books and their real-world impact in the administration’s policies, I concluded:
Sitting here on this Sunday morning before the election, the Sun now up, reflecting back on these years scouring through dusty old Marxist books, trying to understand a president who built his career on a mountain of lies, I confess a peace with either electoral result on Tuesday. A part of me almost wishes that Obama
stealswins reelection (as I anticipate he will). The thought of him quietly retiring to a mansion in Hawaii in January to live out the rest of his life in comfort and adoration should inspire nausea. Only if Obama wins reelection do conservatives have a chance to hold him accountable for Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and all the crimes we don’t even know about yet. The man has blood on his hands and we can’t let him get away with it.An ancient dictum popularized in recent years by the late Christopher Hitchens on the path forward, should Tuesday disappoint:
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
Do Justice and Let the Skies Fall
Over the course of 2013 my views evolved about who seemed to really be making the decisions at the White House. By January this year I began arguing that Obama’s mentor, Valerie Jarrett, was the real power-broker and the one responsible for most of the terrible policies that the administration implemented. From my article “Welcome to Single Mom Nation: In 2014 Acknowledge the Matriarchs Who Really Run America,” where I presented some of the evidence and my conclusions:
Now we know that actually Jarrett was the one with the political savvy who was grooming Obama all along so that she could use him to implement her agenda. Obama is just her mask…
My prediction: when the history books are written the real decision-maker will start to emerge more fully as Jarrett. As people try and make sense of an administration adrift they’ll start to realize that this is a federal government essentially being run by two single moms pulling the strings of the performer son of a single mom with a basic goal of just trying to make America a less “mean” place for other single moms. It’s a matriarchal administration running on emotion and instinct, like a mother crocodile snapping to protect her eggs. This is what happens when a culture that rejects the importance of the Judeo-Christian, nuclear family model takes control of the Democratic Party and the federal government…
President Jarrett has been so successful because she has implemented the most effective of Saul Alinsky’s Chicago gangster community organizing tactics at the national level. (And centrist-corporatist Clinton narcissist Democrats in the primaries and neoconservative-corporatist boomer Republicans in the general elections didn’t even realize what hit them.)
Conservatives should strive to defeat Jarrett the same way that the feds eventually managed to get her ideological predecessor, Al Capone: not for the big crimes but for the small ones like tax evasion. Activists should aspire to discover conclusive, bulletproof evidence of acts she has engaged in which would force her to fall from power, no longer able to implement her across-the-board policies of American weakness.
So of course I’m thrilled with the approach my friend Ben Shapiro chose for his new book, which I’ve recently finished reading. Rather than continue to see the Democrats merely as a rival political party with differing solutions for public policy problems, Ben puts Left vs Right aside and instead makes the case for criminal prosecution of individual members of the Obama administration, structuring each chapter with opening and closing arguments:
1. The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration by Ben Shapiro
One of the biggest mistakes that I’ve observed in so many activists over the years is seeing politics and ideology as the end-all-be-all of how to fix the world. A certain mentality seems to predominate amongst many activists and writers that creates a tunnel vision. If we can just elect the right people and pass the right laws then we can fix America’s problems. Campaigning and activism arise as the paramount solutions.
But sometimes they’re not. Political opponents who embrace the legitimacy of America’s political traditions can be defeated through superior campaign tactics and more inspiring candidates. But criminal organizations willing to subvert the rule of law and do anything to maintain power — like let Americans die at terrorists’ hands rather than look bad during an election, like use the IRS to muzzle and harass opponents, like distribute guns to a Mexican drug cartel in order to further gun control legislation — cannot. The game has been rigged and trying to win it is as foolhardy as playing Monopoly against someone pocketing $500s from the bank when you’re not looking.
The realization that I hope more activists are starting to make as we round the corner into the last fourth of Obama’s presidency: the Democratic Party isn’t a political party that allies with criminals, it’s a criminal organization that has hijacked a political party. Ben lays out the evidence on 7 crimes, any of which individually would have been more than enough to impeach any other president unprotected by a friendly media.
Part of the reason why I agree with Ben’s thesis so strongly is that I’ve continued reading so many other books on related topics that support it, revealing misunderstood concepts in politics, culture, and history. Here’s a list of some of them that are most on my mind this summer as I continue to piece together the tactics and historical predecessors of the criminal organization that’s conned its way into the White House. Some of these are new books just released that I’m reading for the first time, others have been out for years and I’m just getting to them, and some are ones that I’ve already read and am returning to again to read more closely and to guide future research. For each book I’ll explain in brief why it’s a useful piece of the puzzle for understanding an aspect of how our government has been subverted by lifelong, committed activists who do not care if Rule of Law stands in the way of implementing their egalitarian fantasies.
Here’s an index of the 29 more books introduced here in support of shifting to a criminal justice approach rather than an ideological activist protest in the twilight of the Jarrett-Obama presidency; I would encourage you to jump to whichever subject or author interests you most:
- 3 on disinformation by former Romanian spymaster Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
- 3 on terrorism by former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy
- the final 2 by the late Barry Rubin, scholar of the Middle East’s history, culture, and politics
- 3 on Islam and the Jihad today
- 5 on racism and how to overcome it
- 3 on Marxism, its roots, its spread in the 20th century, and how it made a foothold in America which would one day bring it to presidential power
- 5 on cults, idol worship, and the origins of religion
- 5 on American history and its revisionists
- Concluding with an introduction to one of the next subjects of my writing and research, which ties together the themes of all 30 books with Jarrett and Michelle Obama’s favorite TV show…
(page 100)
2. Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus’ Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa
Ronald Reagan described this astounding 1987 memoir as “my Bible for dealing with dictators.” How valuable is the information in this book? How many writers do you know of who had the infamous Carlos the Jackal dispatched to attempt to find and assassinate them? How many writers in their 80s still live in hiding with a million dollar bounty on their head?
Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa was the spymaster for Marxist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. He is the highest ranking defector from the Soviet bloc and the most valuable asset America had during the Cold War for understanding the KGB’s secret tactics in its war against the West.
Pacepa narrates in vivid prose filled with color and details. He has a photographic memory that brings shocking scenes to life as the cruel, paranoid Ceausescu and his horrifying wife Elena plot their methods for maintaining and growing their power through deception. In tactics and ideology there are many parallels between then and now. And they’re named more explicitly in Pacepa’s third book, which I also read last year and am rereading again this year…
“Marxism was such a raw, ill-defined and malleable system of government that one could make if it whatever one wished.” — page 338
3. Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism by Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak
Co-written with a Cold War scholar, this astounding book introduces the reader to the KGB’s “science” of manipulating media and culture on a global scale. Pacepa shows how the KGB was actually the state-within-a-state during the Cold War, planting destructive and anti-American ideas in different cultural groups to divide groups and foment violence. Pacepa shows the specific tactics to transform people’s reputations, making heroes into monsters and whitewashing the pasts of dictators and terrorists in order to gain the sympathies of naive “liberal” do-gooders.
Pacepa and Rychlak detail numerous disinformation plots throughout the 20th century and up through today. (Last year in September I wrote about how the Soviets seeded antisemitism around the world and the price we pay in Syria today.) The one that I’m most interested in exploring deeper this year is the role the KGB played in the assassination of JFK and then the multi-decade propaganda effort to deflect blame to the CIA, causing more Americans to further hate and distrust their own country. Next on the list, this summer I started reading Pacepa’s second book, which focuses on the Kennedy assassination…
4. Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination by Ion Mihai Pacepa
The inability to comprehend and accept who really killed JFK and why is a root, perennial, unresolved conflict in American culture. I knew I had to try to understand it more last year after publishing this presentation of some of the key points: “11 Reasons To Reject JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories.” Pacepa presents an abundance of evidence that the KGB trained Lee Harvey Oswald to be an assassin — a tactic that KGB-man Vladimir Putin still employs today to get rid of his enemies.
After Kennedy’s death the KGB planted multiple, conflicting conspiracy theories about who killed JFK and why. The Democrats of the day were all up front about not even wanting to consider the possibility that Russia was responsible. The implications of that were just too big — just as the reality of who bears responsibility for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and Border Agent Brian Terry is more than most progressives can handle.
Lois Lerner’s missing emails? A rude anti-Islam video inspiring a riot? They are the disinformation children of Operation Dragon, the KGB’s successful mission to both cover themselves and land a devastating cultural blow to America from which we still have not recovered, as the polls show. From page 234 of Disinformation:
http://instagram.com/p/e96naoI7Gb/
As I complete my initial study of Pacepa’s books, I’ll be focusing on the criminal war against America from the opposite perspective, from another hero (beginning with his memoir, Willful Blindness) — Andrew C. McCarthy…
5. Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad by Andrew C. McCarthy
I included McCarthy’s second book The Grand Jihad on my previous list– it’s among my foundational influences in understanding the political, cultural, legal, and military wars being waged against America. Now I’m going deeper, comparing his first and third books to the insights of Pacepa and the current developments in the administration today before diving into his newest book just released this year.
It seems to make sense too to also consider this story of McCarthy’s successful prosecution of the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in the 1990s for the first World Trade Center bombing, to where we’re at 20 years later where after the release of 5 Jihadists for 1 deserter Bowe Bergdahl the possibility is all too real that the Jarrett-Obama administration would happily cave to another “prisoner swap” and release the criminal mastermind.
“Kill them wherever you find them.” — the Blind Sheikh’s call to war, as quoted on page 173 of Spring Fever, McCarthy’s debunking of the myth of the Arab Spring:
6. Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy by Andrew C. McCarthy
Page 180:
7. Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment by Andrew C. McCarthy
I’m not sure yet which specific tactics will be most effective in curtailing further criminality from the Jarrett-Obama administration. Is impeachment the necessary route? Or should prosecutors and citizens pursue potentially easier targets further down, namely, Jarrett? (A part of me is inclined to think that impeachment could only be a possibility if and when whistleblowers emerge with ground-shaking evidence…)
Is the objective to actually remove Obama from office or rather to disarm him from continue to being able to inflict as serious damage? Right now I’m more inclined to Ben’s arguments but after reading McCarthy’s book perhaps I’ll be persuaded to his position that framing the case as an impeachment will be more effective, summarized here:
Many Republicans say an effort to impeach Barack Obama is political suicide for the Republican Party. How do you respond to this?
McCarthy: The failure to pursue impeachment is likely to be suicide for the country, which is much more important than the political fate of the Republican Party. But, again, making the case for impeachment—which would probably help not only Republicans but any elected official who defends our constitutional framework—is not the same as moving forward with articles of impeachment, which should not happen absent public support.
How does the case for Barack Obama’s impeachment compare to the campaigns to impeach Nixon and Clinton?
McCarthy: Obama’s presidency is a willful, systematic attack on the constitutional system of separation of powers, an enterprise that aims to bring about a new regime of government by executive decree. This is exactly the kind of subversion the Framers designed the impeachment power to address. The Nixon and Clinton episodes involved misconduct that did not aim to undermine our constitutional framework.
You describe impeachment as a political and not a legal remedy. What’s the distinction?
McCarthy: Legally speaking, a president may be impeached for a single offense that qualifies as “high crimes and misdemeanors”—a breach of the profound public trust vested in the president, a violation of his constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully. But real impeachment requires the public will to remove the president from office. You can have a thousand impeachable offenses, but without that political consensus, impeachment is not an appropriate remedy.
A piece of answering this question of tactics will be in an increased understanding of the specific political-criminal cult which now controls the White House and the Democratic Party. My friend and late mentor Barry Rubin wrote his final book to give us the map…
http://instagram.com/p/mIyZdAI7Pz/
(page 43)
8. Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance by Barry Rubin
You did it, Barry. You wrote the book that lays out the evolution from Marx through Lenin and Stalin, the adjustment of the New Left, and the tactical shift into the “Third Left” of today which relies on a multi-cultural chameleon bad cop (Jarrett) teamed with her smiley faced good cop (Obama) to forge a broad political coalition.
This book builds on the revelations of Stanley Kurtz’s original research into the community organizing “stealth socialist” movement that nurtured Obama and Jarrett. It puts them in the broader political, cultural context. Going deeper though, we have to connect with Barry’s second-to-last book, also published this year, to begin to process the horrors of where the postmodern, all-cultures-are-equally-good philosophy leads…
(Page 175)
9. Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz
Among the historical truths I gained from Pacepa’s work last year is a greater understanding of the role the KGB played in promoting antisemitism and conspiracism in the Middle East during the Cold War. Now this year I’m going to go back a few decades more to consider the Nazi influence on today’s ideological movements that the Jarrett-Obama administration thinks deserve their own states.
10. Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes
11. Arab Winter Comes to America: The Truth About the War We’re In by Robert Spencer
How has the Jihad threat to America evolved over the last decade? Is the enemy that attacked the United States on September 11 the same as the one making war against us today?
Just as I’m considering how McCarthy’s Willful Blindness depicts 1990s counterterrorism in relation to the so-called “Arab Spring” dissected in his third book, I’m hoping this Daniel Pipes book from 2002 will have some interesting parallels when read alongside Robert Spencer’s new book.
(See my previous pieces last year about Pipes and Spencer. An excerpt from Arab Winter Comes to America is also available here.)
“Contrary to their reputation, many Islamists are of the modern world, at home with computers, with K-Street lobbying techniques, and adept at the game of victimology.” – Daniel Pipes in 2002’s Militant Islam Comes to America.
“Obama also sent his senior advisor Valerie Jarrett to be keynote speaker at ISNA’s national convention in 2009.” – Robert Spencer, page 79 of Arab Winter Comes to America…
12. Dancing with the Devil: The Perils of Engaging Rogue Regimes by Michael Rubin
Play with fire long enough and eventually you will get burned. The first two criminal charges in Ben’s book focus on the deaths caused by the failure of Jarrett-Obama policies in Benghazi and Mexico. In both cases the flawed belief was that a lawless threat could be contained, controlled, and redirected. And these aren’t aberrations — this is the overall approach — and it’s just an extension of what the Democratic Party has long sought to do by placating enemies instead of defeating them.
Foreign policy scholar Michael Rubin’s new book this year looks at this phenomenon in a bigger context, considering case studies of American diplomatic failure with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. It should make for engaging reading alongside Pacepa’s Red Horizons and Disinformation.
13. and 14. Why We Won’t Talk Honestly About Race by Harry Stein and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
How is it that so few are willing to consider the criminality of the Jarrett-Obama administration when the abundant evidence surrounds us? Even many progressives have stumbled into admitting the answer. Actor and longtime socialist activist Ed Asner in 2013 to The Hollywood Reporter:
“A lot of people don’t want to feel anti-black by being opposed to Obama.”
White, so-called liberals do not want to confront the black criminals in the executive branch because somehow they think that to do so would reveal that deep down they must hate all black people. So they will defend Jarrett-Obama administration policies that cause greater poverty and more death for black people.
“…baby boomers generally were the beneficiaries of a near-perfect synchronicity between our adolescent rebellion and the advent of white guilt.” – Shelby Steele, page 92 of White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era:
These two essay collections capture the way race has warped the culture and politics for baby boomers their entire lives. The next offers an approach from Generation X…
15. Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed by Jason L. Riley
This extraordinary polemical analysis is dedicated to Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele and it’s very much a welcome and needed addition to the tradition of economic-cultural criticism they developed. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason L. Riley builds his book into a lean missile of precise facts and research. Don’t hesitate on this one because you think you already know about how Great Society welfare policies fueled the explosion of single motherhood and soft-on-crime policies lit the fuse for decades of gang violence. Riley provides fresh insights and writes at a flowing, page-turning pace. Sowell was right when he said about the book, “A much-needed, fundamental education in the facts about race in America… I cannot think of any book that has said so much in so few pages since Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom back in 1962.”
“When the Obama administration is over black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category.” – the progressive radio host Tavis Smiley, as quoted on page 10:
16 and 17. Frederick Douglass : Autobiographies and Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
The most famous black American of the 19th century, former slave-turned editor and orator Frederick Douglass, died in 1895 at 77. After carrying on his intellectual tradition of self-improvement and self-reliance over the next two decades, former slave Booker T. Washington would die in 1915 at 59. Yet W.E.B. Dubois lived until August 27, 1963, dying at 95 in Ghana, having rejected America and joined the Communist Party, a foreshadow of one direction that many blacks would pursue — choosing Marxism instead of Liberty, God, and America.
“They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.” Page 69 of Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery
Here’s a question: how would the 20th century have turned out differently if it had been Washington who lived into the ’60s and DuBois’s influence who had been cut short?
Page 102 of Harry Stein’s Why We Won’t Talk Honestly About Race:
But both Jarrett and Obama would grow up as the second generation of a different intellectual/activist tradition, one that rejected Rule of Law and served foreign tyranny…
“Like a mom, a big sister, I trust her implicitly.” – Michelle Obama describes her relationship with Jarrett as quoted on page 294:
18. The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor by Paul Kengor
The conquest of black culure and the unifying of black identity with the cause of a larger government required a multi-generational effort. I want to get a better understanding of the mechanisms through which the Soviet Union’s idea achieved such success.
So in returning back to studying Frank Marshall Davis, this time I do so from a differing angle, rather than as some key revealing Obama’s true motives, instead as a figure unto himself with a long career of blending activism and art on behalf of the 20th century’s great monsters.
And as I wrap up my Marxism studies in Pacepa’s books, it’s time to turn to books and subjects I’ve avoid too long. The big pieces of the puzzle, about the personalities whose marks on the 20th century were perhaps bigger than any other and whose heirs America now encounters today in Putin, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Mullahs of Iran, and ISIS…
http://instagram.com/p/ppMDO7I7Gr/
19. Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek Kolakowski
For years I kept Main Currents more as a reference book, looking up specific authors and subjects as needed. But now it’s time to get a better grasp of the whole picture, of understanding the intellectual-ideological process of how the Marxist-Criminal government and personality cult arose and how they shift and transform according to the needs of the moment.
The better conservative activists can understand the mechanisms by which Marxist cults rise and fall and transform the better equipped they will be to nudge those changes to America’s advantage.
20. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock
My intent in selecting this book for reading this year is not to compare the Jarrett-Obama mind-meld to one of the 20th century’s most evil symbols. In the 1930s parallel, rather they fill the role of FDR.
I want to understand better the mistakes that the Roosevelt administration made in misunderstanding Hitler and Stalin, that led to World War II and then set the stage for the Cold War. Why must we accept that these wars were inevitable? In studying Hitler and Stalin I want to understand better what the opportunities were to prevent the wars that ended up defining the century.
A World War IV with a body count on par with previous global conflicts is not an inevitability.
21. and 22. Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered by Leora Batnitzky and The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig
From PJ Media columnist David P. Goldman‘s articles and books I’ve developed a fascination with Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. This book provides accessible insight into a core component of his thought very much of relevance to those wanting to better understand and overcome the powerful personality cults dominating America today. Leora Batnitzky focuses the discussion of Rosenzweig on idolatry, the primitive religious practice Judaism evolved against. For Rosenzweig idolatry is not based in the images or in the “foreign” customs of competing religions. It’s based in an incorrect apprehension of how to worship. Rosenzweig argues that the postmodernist, Nietzchean, truth-is-relative philosopher engages in the same practice as the ancient idolaters, self-worship, from page 47:
Once I finish reading Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed this year it’ll be time to focus on The Star of Redemption. As Goldman’s first essay book demonstrates, Rosenzweig’s ideas provide piercing analysis of our culture today…
23. It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations by Spengler as channeled by David P. Goldman
In this collection of essays derived from his Asia Times column and later expanded into the book How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), Goldman demonstrates how to apply Rosenzweig’s understanding of modern day neo-pagan culture to analyzing the West’s many pathologies. For example? Why do so many find such pleasure through indulging in gory, brutal, torture fantasies? “The pagan sees nature as arbitrary and cruel, and the monsters that breed in the pagan imagination personify this cruelty,” Goldman writing on horror movies on page 176:
Those who cannot feel God’s presence will settle for feeling anything, even pain and terror are better than the numb indifference that comes from perceiving one’s own life as no more meaningful than an animal’s or anything else in nature.
An excerpt from one of the White House’s favorite TV shows today…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtASusxHjmY
“In psychopathic types, basic hostility toward the father still remains, but a hostility now dissimulated and directed outward onto society at large.” – page 141
24. They Shall Take Up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult by Weston La Barre
Weston La Barre was a cultural anthropologist who studied primitive and tribal religions. In this book from 1962 he compares research on the charismatic snake-handling cult leaders and draws comparisons to African snake shamans and the origins of Greek, Jewish, and Christian religions. It provides a fascinating case study into how a cult arises and functions, both in its modern setting and in the ancient world. What kind of person chooses to create a cult based around their personality? What shortcomings in their own life inspire them to create a surrogate emotional family?
La Barre’s magnum opus from 1970 would dig 600 pages deeper…
“Diffusion of a cult is identical with the diffusion of a culture.”
25. Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion by Weston La Barre
This is the most interesting, useful book I’ve yet come across for explaining the transitioning from polytheism and Pagan nature worship to monotheism and Judeo-Christian transcendence worship. I found it through reading Robert Anton Wilson’s experiment Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy where it’s mentioned as a scholarly source in an esoteric subject I’ve avoided for a decade: Shamanism
I’ve wandered amidst New Age religions and “dabbled” in occult practice for over 10 years now but I always looked the other way on learning more about what it meant to be a “shaman.” It always just seemed too hippiesh and lame — primitive is the correct word.
And La Barre shows indeed that is what it is — but it’s also the root of religion. The charismatic man takes control of nature and proves that he can master it better than others. Moses was a snake shaman. The Biblical narrative of Moses vs the Egyptian Pharaoh is a series of shamanic contests. The people would follow whichever god won. And so it remains today.
“To insist we already have the solutions is often to remain possessed of the problems.” – Weston La Barre, page 21:
An excerpt from page 216 reveals the President’s appreciation for HBO, especially The Wire and its charismatic killer Omar.
26. What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House by Tevi Troy
“A pacifist cannot exist without someone willing to die for him.” – @greggutfeld just now on The @DennisPrager Show. #tcot
— David Swindle (@DaveSwindle) March 18, 2014
Historian Tevi Troy’s What Jefferson Read, Ike Watched, and Obama Tweeted: 200 Years of Popular Culture in the White House is an accessible, illuminative survey of the different books, plays, music, and later films, television, and websites that influenced the presidency. The final chapter is devoted to Obama, both the pop culture he consumed throughout his life and how he shapes it himself today. On page 238 Troy quotes from Daniel Boorstin in 1962 who foresaw the age that television would create: “Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals… An effective president must be every year more concerned with projecting images of himself.”
The “projecting images,” aka “building a personality cult,” or as disinformation describes it, glasnost, is among the few tasks the Jarrett-Obama has excelled at the most – their one area of genuine competence.
Page 8 of The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration:
27, 28, and 29. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn Vs Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People with Hating America: A History by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin refereeing
“And Obama’s radical reading of history taught him that he must show sympathy to Islam in order to prove that he–and America–were breaking with the country’s imperialist, aggressive, and bigoted past.” – Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution page 182:
During my leftist college years I owned a copy of Zinn’s infamous version of American history but I never sat down and dutifully read it all the way through. (Zinn was hardly the most skilled prose stylist and thankfully no professor ever required it.) So like Main Currents of Marxism the thick book has more served as a reference book, providing answers when I wanted to check and see what the popular progressive spin of any given historical period or personage was likely to be.
Paul Johnson’s history is both more factually reliable and easier to read. (I’m several hundred pages into Johnson’s 1000-page book. His literary style is seemingly unbeatable among historical writers.) I think to turbo-charge and focus my finishing both books, and to gain a better grasp of the depth between the radical and patriotic understanding of history, I’m going to start juxtaposing passages between them to see the level of disparity.
As an additional resource for understanding Zinn’s anti-American version of history and its effect on Jarrett-Obama administration lawlessness, I’ll consider the longer history of Anti-Americanism as described in Barry Rubin’s Hating America: A History. From the introduction:
(From the introduction, pages XXII-XXIII, defining the concepts within Western Civilization responsible for enabling American exceptionalism.)
30. America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century-Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus
I reviewed America 3.0 last year on a significant day, “On 9/11 and Benghazi’s Anniversary, We End Conservative Pessimism and Right-Wing Apocalypticism“:
I’ve been waiting for a book like Bennett and Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In the 21stCentury—Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come for years. We’ve needed a book that proclaims with confidence and literary elegance both how we got here and how to move forward to bring about unimaginable levels of prosperity.
While I anticipated a book of futurism at first, America 3.0’s first 170 pages – after the first chapter’s quick jaunt to an ideal 2040 – are an invigorating history, explaining the components of the Western value system that led to America’s founding and evolution into a global power and economic engine so wealthy that her poor suffer not starvation but obesity.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe the cultural inheritance – particularly our English and Germanic influences — that formed the key values that shaped America. Bennett and Lotus also rightfully name and make the case for the Absolute Nuclear Family as the foundation, an institution that nurtures the individual and thus promotes economic growth and a rejection of tribal war. A culture whose people’s primary concern is giving their children the skills and value systems to live free and create their own family will grow, thrive and innovate their way to great, glorious future. (As I blogged about when first starting America 3.0 in July, their vision of 2040 is tantalizing – though they admit that their technological predictions are very conservative. We’ll probably be much further along technologically than they suggest.)
(Page 48)
America 3.0 possesses numerous tools and arguments for interpreting the world and advocating for a more prosperous future. The one worth picking up for this task of defeating Valerie Jarrett’s political-criminal cult is the centrality it places on the absolute nuclear family. Bennett and Lotus present persuasive evidence that the unique secret that makes America so prosperous and dominant is the family culture that nurtures strong individuals who can go forth and create new inventions, businesses, and wealth.
That model is under assault at the highest levels today by individuals who believe there is a better one, that the state can replace the father as it already has in the culture from which Jarrett and Obama emerged:
“Today, more than 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers.” – Jason L. Riley, page 37 of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed:
Finally: A conclusion that attempts to put the pieces together…
Conclusion
What I hope this list has demonstrated is that the political world is just one of many battlegrounds that intersect in a broader battle amongst many different cultures. This isn’t just a contest of Democrats and Republicans or two competing ideologies. Issues of race, terrorism, disinformation, assassination, family culture, economics, media and TV shows, and law intersect and affect one another.
In particular: there is a big link between criminal culture and the fatherless home, a central theme in one of the most popular TV shows today, including in the Obama White house, ABC’s Scandal:
The show features the machinations of “scandal fixer” Olivia Pope and her team of do-whatever-it-takes super lawyers, thugs, and hackers who manipulate the mass media, neutralizing a client’s bad news while pinning the blame on others. As the show progresses through the seasons Pope and Associates get progressively more criminal, at times even resorting to torture.
Michelle Obama is a fan:
“I watched all the seasons, I caught up on ‘Scandal,’ I had never watched it,” she said. “I love Kerry Washington, she is amazing, so it makes the show fun.”
During the Bush years the fictional presidency that Democrats had to escape to was The West Wing which presented the dream leader baby boomers wanted. Now in Scandal we have a fantasy of Republicans doing the kinds of cover-ups the real presidency has engaged in for years.
Jarrett herself wrote the Time 100 profile celebrating Kerry Washington’s portrayal of the show’s anti-hero, a woman carrying on an affair with the married President (emphases added):
Occasionally in American pop culture, an icon emerges who captivates us and provides a vivid snapshot of who we are and the changing times in which we live. In her role as Olivia Pope, Scandal’s unflappable political fixer, Kerry Washington has used her grace and vibrant magnetism to transcend age, race and gender, and to provide a new mainstream media lens through which to view modern womanhood and professional excellence.
Setting aside the “scandalous” melodrama necessary to sustain a fictional series so titled, Kerry has offered up a fresh new archetype for what it means to lead while combining courage and compassion, strength and vulnerability, passion, steely discipline and unfailing loyalty. It is a role that makes full use of her distinctive talent for drawing in audiences with such authenticity that we often forget she is acting.
Scandal is a deeply disturbing show with themes and content often shocking to see in primetime. It’s so sad to see a combination soap opera and torture show held up as though it presents anything positive for young people to strive toward. In addition to boosters from the world’s most powerful women, the NAACP has also given it multiple “Image” awards. Scandal is like House of Cards in its depiction of a wild, bacchanalia Washington D.C. The big difference is that it’s on ABC in primetime instead of tucked away on Netflix streaming amongst other “mature” programming.
This year my wife and I watched all three seasons of Scandal as research for her Master’s of Fine Arts thesis project this spring. “Keep Calm We’re All Evil” was the slogan she chose for the painting and wall installation inspired by fans who embrace the nihilistic values celebrated on Scandal.
Now this fall as I continue to study the books on this list and observe the continuing unfolding Jarrett-Obama administration scandals I’m going to draw the parallels between the fantasies on the show and our perpetually more surreal American reality. Art and fiction have more power than we usually give them credit…
“It is also significant that all early musical instruments-drum, musical bow, rasp, rattle or harp-were originally shaman’s magic paraphernalia specifically and still are among primitive Siberian and American Indian tribes.” – Weston La Barre, page 422 of Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion
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