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.

[Herman]

A shocking, darkly hilarious exploration of how Canada, a country once admired for its stability and moderation, became a global cautionary tale.

Drawing from real headlines, deep research, and extensive interviews, acclaimed journalist Tristin Hopper uncovers the bizarre missteps and policy experiments that have helped Canada set new global standards for disfunction. The examples are legion: the real estate bubble that never bursts, Orwellian internet regulations, harm reduction policies that escalate harm, official health guidelines that recommended the use of glory holes in a pandemic, and a runaway euthanasia system that inspired the Wall Street Journal to declare, "Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now."

As sobering as it is comic, Don't Be Canada examines the cascading consequences of extreme policies and tells the tragic story of a country that took its wealth, tolerance, and functionality for granted.

[formosan]

A shocking, darkly hilarious exploration of how Canada, a country once admired for its stability and moderation, became a global cautionary tale.

Drawing from real headlines, deep research, and extensive interviews, acclaimed journalist Tristin Hopper uncovers the bizarre missteps and policy experiments that have helped Canada set new global standards for disfunction. The examples are legion: the real estate bubble that never bursts, Orwellian internet regulations, harm reduction policies that escalate harm, official health guidelines that recommended the use of glory holes in a pandemic, and a runaway euthanasia system that inspired the Wall Street Journal to declare, "Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now."

As sobering as it is comic, Don't Be Canada examines the cascading consequences of extreme policies and tells the tragic story of a country that took its wealth, tolerance, and functionality for granted.

That sounds like a depressing book Herman.

[Brent]

A shocking, darkly hilarious exploration of how Canada, a country once admired for its stability and moderation, became a global cautionary tale.

Drawing from real headlines, deep research, and extensive interviews, acclaimed journalist Tristin Hopper uncovers the bizarre missteps and policy experiments that have helped Canada set new global standards for disfunction. The examples are legion: the real estate bubble that never bursts, Orwellian internet regulations, harm reduction policies that escalate harm, official health guidelines that recommended the use of glory holes in a pandemic, and a runaway euthanasia system that inspired the Wall Street Journal to declare, "Welcome to Canada, the Doctor Will Kill You Now."

As sobering as it is comic, Don't Be Canada examines the cascading consequences of extreme policies and tells the tragic story of a country that took its wealth, tolerance, and functionality for granted.

I might buy it.

[DKG]

When the book Grave Error was published by True North in late 2023, it became an instant bestseller. People wanted to read the book because it contained well-documented information not readily available elsewhere concerning the history of Canada's Indian Residential Schools (IRS) and the facts surrounding recent claims about "unmarked graves."

Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong is the just-published sequel to Grave Error. Edited by Chris Champion and me, with chapters written by knowledgeable academics, journalists, researchers, and even several contributors who once worked directly in residential schools or dedicated Indian hospitals, Dead Wrong was published because the struggle for accurate information on this contentious subject continues. Let me share with you a little of what's in Dead Wrong.

Outrageously, the New York Times, the world's most influential newspaper among liberals and "progressives," has never retracted its outrageously false headline that "mass graves" were uncovered at Kamloops in 2021. Journalist Jonathan Kay exposes that scandal.

With similarly warped judgment, the legacy media were enthused about last year's so-called documentary Sugarcane, a feature-length film sponsored by National Geographic and nominated for an Academy Award. The only reporter to spot Sugarcane's dozens of egregious factual errors was independent journalist Michelle Stirling; her expose is included in Dead Wrong.

In spring 2024, the small Interior BC city of Quesnel made national news when the mayor's wife bought ten copies of Grave Error for distribution to friends. After noisy protests by people who had never read the book, Quesnel city council voted to censure Mayor Ron Paull and tried to force him from office. It's all described in Dead Wrong.

Also not to be forgotten is how the Law Society of BC has forced upon its members training materials that assert against all evidence that children's remains have been discovered at Kamloops. As told by James Pew, BC MLA Dallas Brodie was expelled not from the NDP but from the Conservative caucus for daring to point out this obvious and incontrovertible falsehood. But the facts are that ground-penetrating radar (used at the former Kamloops IRS) can detect only "anomalies" or "disturbances," not identify what those might be; that no excavations have been carried out; and that no human remains whatsoever, let alone "215 children's bodies," have been found there. Brodie is completely correct.

Then there is the story of Jim McMurtry, suspended by the Abbotsford District School Board shortly after the May 2021 Kamloops announcement. McMurtry's offence was to tell students the truth that, while some indigenous students did die in residential schools, the main cause was tuberculosis. His own book, The Scarlet Lesson, is excerpted in Dead Wrong.

Historian Ian Gentles and former IRS teacher Pim Wiebel offer a richly detailed analysis of health and medical conditions in the schools. They show that these were much better than what prevailed in the Indian reserves from which most students came.

Another important contribution to understanding the medical issues is by Dr. Eric Schloss, narrating the history of the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton. IRS facilities usually included small clinics, but students with serious problems were often transferred to Indian Hospitals for more intensive care. Schloss, who worked in the Camsell, describes how it delivered state-of-the-art medicine, probably better than the care available to most non-native children anywhere in Canada at the time.

Rodney Clifton's contribution, "They would call me a 'Denier,'" describes his personal experiences working in two IRS in the 1960s. Clifton does not tell stories of hunger, brutal punishment, and suppression of indigenous culture, but of games, laughter, and trying to learn Native languages from his Indian and Inuit charges.

And far from the IRS system being a deliberate, sustained program of cultural genocide, as Toronto lawyer and historian Greg Piasetzki explains, the historical fact is that "Canada wanted to close all residential schools in the 1940s. Here's why it couldn't." That's because for many Aboriginal parents, particularly single parents and/or those with large numbers of children, residential schools were the best deal available. In addition to schooling their kids, they offered paid employment to large numbers of indigenous Canadians as cooks, janitors, farmers, and healthcare workers, and later as teachers and even principals.

Another gravely important issue is the recent phenomenon of charging critics with "residential school denialism." This is a false accusation hurled by true believers in what has become known as the "Kamloops narrative", aimed at shutting down criticism or questions. A key event in this process was when NDP MP Leah Gazan in 2022 persuaded the House of Commons to approve a resolution, "That, in the opinion of the House, this government must recognize what happened in Canada's Indian residential schools as genocide."

As the proponents of the Kamloops narrative fail to provide convincing hard evidence for it, they hope to mobilize the authority of the state to stamp out dissent. One of the main goals behind the publication of Dead Wrong is to head off this drive toward authoritarianism.

Happily, Dead Wrong is already an Amazon best-seller based on pre-publication orders. The struggle for truth continues.

[Lokmar]

When the book Grave Error was published by True North in late 2023, it became an instant bestseller. People wanted to read the book because it contained well-documented information not readily available elsewhere concerning the history of Canada's Indian Residential Schools (IRS) and the facts surrounding recent claims about "unmarked graves."

Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong is the just-published sequel to Grave Error. Edited by Chris Champion and me, with chapters written by knowledgeable academics, journalists, researchers, and even several contributors who once worked directly in residential schools or dedicated Indian hospitals, Dead Wrong was published because the struggle for accurate information on this contentious subject continues. Let me share with you a little of what's in Dead Wrong.

Outrageously, the New York Times, the world's most influential newspaper among liberals and "progressives," has never retracted its outrageously false headline that "mass graves" were uncovered at Kamloops in 2021. Journalist Jonathan Kay exposes that scandal.

With similarly warped judgment, the legacy media were enthused about last year's so-called documentary Sugarcane, a feature-length film sponsored by National Geographic and nominated for an Academy Award. The only reporter to spot Sugarcane's dozens of egregious factual errors was independent journalist Michelle Stirling; her expose is included in Dead Wrong.

In spring 2024, the small Interior BC city of Quesnel made national news when the mayor's wife bought ten copies of Grave Error for distribution to friends. After noisy protests by people who had never read the book, Quesnel city council voted to censure Mayor Ron Paull and tried to force him from office. It's all described in Dead Wrong.

Also not to be forgotten is how the Law Society of BC has forced upon its members training materials that assert against all evidence that children's remains have been discovered at Kamloops. As told by James Pew, BC MLA Dallas Brodie was expelled not from the NDP but from the Conservative caucus for daring to point out this obvious and incontrovertible falsehood. But the facts are that ground-penetrating radar (used at the former Kamloops IRS) can detect only "anomalies" or "disturbances," not identify what those might be; that no excavations have been carried out; and that no human remains whatsoever, let alone "215 children's bodies," have been found there. Brodie is completely correct.

Then there is the story of Jim McMurtry, suspended by the Abbotsford District School Board shortly after the May 2021 Kamloops announcement. McMurtry's offence was to tell students the truth that, while some indigenous students did die in residential schools, the main cause was tuberculosis. His own book, The Scarlet Lesson, is excerpted in Dead Wrong.

Historian Ian Gentles and former IRS teacher Pim Wiebel offer a richly detailed analysis of health and medical conditions in the schools. They show that these were much better than what prevailed in the Indian reserves from which most students came.

Another important contribution to understanding the medical issues is by Dr. Eric Schloss, narrating the history of the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton. IRS facilities usually included small clinics, but students with serious problems were often transferred to Indian Hospitals for more intensive care. Schloss, who worked in the Camsell, describes how it delivered state-of-the-art medicine, probably better than the care available to most non-native children anywhere in Canada at the time.

Rodney Clifton's contribution, "They would call me a 'Denier,'" describes his personal experiences working in two IRS in the 1960s. Clifton does not tell stories of hunger, brutal punishment, and suppression of indigenous culture, but of games, laughter, and trying to learn Native languages from his Indian and Inuit charges.

And far from the IRS system being a deliberate, sustained program of cultural genocide, as Toronto lawyer and historian Greg Piasetzki explains, the historical fact is that "Canada wanted to close all residential schools in the 1940s. Here's why it couldn't." That's because for many Aboriginal parents, particularly single parents and/or those with large numbers of children, residential schools were the best deal available. In addition to schooling their kids, they offered paid employment to large numbers of indigenous Canadians as cooks, janitors, farmers, and healthcare workers, and later as teachers and even principals.

Another gravely important issue is the recent phenomenon of charging critics with "residential school denialism." This is a false accusation hurled by true believers in what has become known as the "Kamloops narrative", aimed at shutting down criticism or questions. A key event in this process was when NDP MP Leah Gazan in 2022 persuaded the House of Commons to approve a resolution, "That, in the opinion of the House, this government must recognize what happened in Canada's Indian residential schools as genocide."

As the proponents of the Kamloops narrative fail to provide convincing hard evidence for it, they hope to mobilize the authority of the state to stamp out dissent. One of the main goals behind the publication of Dead Wrong is to head off this drive toward authoritarianism.

Happily, Dead Wrong is already an Amazon best-seller based on pre-publication orders. The struggle for truth continues.

People love to be told what they want to hear. At least half the white population is primed for white guilt so they lap it up non stop. Trying to erase all the established lies will be nearly impossible.

[Brent]

People love to be told what they want to hear. At least half the white population is primed for white guilt so they lap it up non stop. Trying to erase all the established lies will be nearly impossible.

Our progtard politicians want to make saying the myth of child mass graves are a myth a crume. They want to legislate lies into law.

[Lokmar]

Our progtard politicians want to make saying the myth of child mass graves are a myth a crume. They want to legislate lies into law.

Thats some wild shit!

[Brent]

Thats some wild shit!

It is. I forget how many years it has been since they announced a mass grave of kids. Not one bone has ever been discovered.