Book Review Thread

[Herman]

Josephine, tell your man Thiel to buy you this for your seventy fifth birthday this year.

[DKG]

Tulsi Gabbard has written a brilliant new book — her first — that lays out another, perhaps more dangerous challenge to liberal democracy and the health of our republic. "For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind" is Gabbard's tour de force look into the true battle for America's soul and future.

This time, the threat is not radical clerics preaching bloodthirsty doctrine in camps on the other side of the world. It's not beholden to medieval foreign powers enriched by oil. It's not foreign at all, though it's thoroughly alien to the American way of thinking and living.

The threat is the Democratic Party that Gabbard courageously left behind in 2022 and hopes others will leave behind, too.

Gabbard opens her book with a salvo aimed squarely at her former party. "Guided by their belief that the ends justify the means," Gabbard writes, "the Democrat elite are using the power of law enforcement to target political or persona opponents, undermining the essence of the rule of law and exposing their contempt for the American people and democracy."

"If we allow this to continue, the America we know and love will disappear forever," she warns.

"If we allow this to continue, the America we know and love will disappear forever," she warns.

Just consider the Obama and Biden administrations. Under Obama, the IRS sued nuns and targeted legitimate opposition groups — the Tea Party that sprang up around the country to challenge him — using lawfare to intimidate and to take opponents out of action.

During the Trump administration, beginning well before inauguration, Biden and other high-ranking Democrats launched the Russia collusion hoax which plagued and undermined Trump's entire presidency.

As Trump seeks to unseat Biden, he faces no less than 91 indictments, all brought against him by partisan Democrats. Some of these same Democrats have no problem allowing violent criminals to run free, they have no problem erasing our border and with it our national security, and they have no problem engaging in illicit activities from which they personally profit. The rule of law means nothing to them. But they are using our legal system to interfere in a presidential election, crossing a Rubicon and marching to assault our republic at its very foundation.

These actions and more, Gabbard writes, may amount to "the final nails in the coffin of our democracy."

Gabbard notes that we now live in a nation of double standards, two nations in parallel really. In one, Democrat elites and their friends can get away with anything. In the other, Democrat elites indict and prosecute Trump and anyone else who challenges them for actions that have never been prosecuted and that they've done themselves.

The classified documents case makes this clear. Biden's Department of Justice has indicted Trump for keeping classified records. But Biden has also been caught with classified records and faces no risk of prosecution whatsoever. He was barely even investigated and let off as an "elderly man with a poor memory," while Trump faces spending the rest of his life in prison if he's convicted. Among other things, in the Democrat elites' minds, such an outcome would take their most effective opponent off the board — and intimidate other would-be challengers at the same time.

This is, as Gabbard writes, unprecedented in America — and fundamentally un-American.

[Herman]

A young socialist gets the chance to earn a multimillion-dollar inheritance from the conservative grandfather he's never met, but to do so, he must complete a cross-country road trip designed to alter his cynical view of America.

Tom Brock is a twenty-five-year-old democratic socialist. He is an unemployed graduate student with a mountain of student loan debt. He loathes America for being a corrupt, oppressive, unjust failure that he blames on the white patriarchy and red-state Americans.

Tom's grandfather, Bob, is a widower, a Vietnam War veteran, and a diehard conservative. Bob is a wealthy entrepreneur and passionate defender of the American dream. He loves America and loathes the morally bankrupt blue-state progressives he thinks are ruining it.

Tom and Bob have never met each other.

But when Bob becomes aware of his grandson's radical politics, he offers him an unusual opportunity to earn a $25 million inheritance: Tom must complete a marathon cross-country road trip in his grandfather's old RV, following an itinerary designed by Bob as a last-ditch effort to alter his grandson's cynical view of America.

Desperate to earn the inheritance, Tom embarks on Bob's curated grand tour of historic sites and natural wonders, stubbornly resisting his grandfather's lessons touting America's virtues. But as the journey progresses, Tom's deeply held worldview is tested by the people and places he encounters along the way—especially by a young British woman who becomes his fortuitous traveling companion. The challenges and conversations of the quirky road trip begin to reshape Tom's ingrained assumptions about America's—and his own—past, present, and future.

[Herman]

Josephine, tell your man Thiel to buy you this for your seventy fifth birthday this year.

Zetsu, how are ya brother?

[DKG]

Bulletproof: How a Shot Meant for Donald Trump Took Out Joe Biden

The Unanswered Questions of the Most Consequential Week in American Political History
 
We the people of the United States have questions. And we deserve answers.
 
Bulletproof: How a Shot Meant for Donald Trump Took Out Joe Biden is the first complete preliminary investigative report on the attempted assassination of President Donald J. Trump that occurred on July 13, 2024, at 6:11 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time in Butler, PA, USA.
 
Bulletproof reconstructs a minute-by-minute parallel timeline of each step of that fateful day, for President Trump, law enforcement agencies, and the would-be assassin, and digs deeper than the official narrative, asking uncomfortable questions about how this event occurred and going deeper than mainstream media ever will.

In addition, Bulletproof breaks new and exclusive stories from an independent private investigator team commissioned by the authors into the hidden life of shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, and also breaks new ground, digging into the best-kept-secret details of how the failed "hit" on Trump dominoed into a palace coup of a sitting US president. Posobiec and Lisec bring the receipts.