Let the sunshine in

As a dispassionate observer of American politics, I just finished listening to the audiobook edition of The Courage to Be Free: Florida's Blueprint for America's Revival, by Florida Governor, and as yet undeclared 2024 Presidential candidate, Ron DeSantis.

It certainly reads like a campaign biography, recounting his life story, his taking on cultural elites, woke corporations and the news media, and managing to keep his state out of lockdown when the Covid 19 pandemic was at its height. Some of this record may resonate with potential voters. While he seems to be a solid conservative, and a staunch family man, unlike his likely main rival in the primaries, it will fall to other biographers and commentators to assess his character. 

It was a good decision to have a professional voiceover artist narrate most of the book. DeSantis sounded flat and monotone in the dedication, epigraph, and closing credits. He will need to develop his speaking skills if he wants to lift his poll numbers and be competitive in what will probably be a tough campaign, perhaps as bitterly fought as the 2016 campaign. 

According to the most recent RealClearPolitics polling data for the 2024 Republican nomination, he is placed a distant second behind former President Donald Trump. 

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-courage-to-be-free-ron-desantis?variant=40977857544226

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/us/2024_republican_presidential_nomination-7548.html

Grace and mercy

I am looking forward to reading, or to be more precise, listening to on Audible, So Help Me God, the autobiography of former United States Vice President, Mike Pence. Pence and President Trump famously fell out when Pence did not overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election, which to this day, Trump stubbornly asserts was stolen from him.

It is widely speculated that Pence is positioning himself to run for the Presidency in 2024. The publisher's blurb hints at this, stating that Pence is open to accepting "the next challenge." These types of books are usually part of a candidates' campaign strategy. The BBC thinks it very likely that he will be one of the contenders, as will Trump. If so, former allies will become rivals. Trump will mercilessly attack him, just as he did to his opponents in 2016, which will add an interesting dynamic to the primary and caucus season. 

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/11/11/trump-pence-relationship-mike-pence-new-book-details-jan-6-todd-dnt-vpx.cnn

Egg on your face

It must be embarrassing to be one of Australia's most prominent political journalists, and release a book with a glaring error in it. Plots and Prayers by Niki Savva was supposed to be the definitive account of the plot that removed Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister of Australia, replacing him with Scott Morrison, and how this leadership instability lead to the Liberal Party's massive defeat at the 2019 federal election. 

When the Liberal Party unexpectedly and convincingly won the election, forming a majority government, Savva had to hastily revise her book. Evidently, errors weren't picked up, such as the one pictured here, noticed on Twitter. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who was Turnbull's predecessor, lost his seat of Warringah to a high profile independent candidate, former Winter Olympian Zali Steggall. Here it is erroneously named as Wentworth. That seat was formerly held by Malcolm Turnbull. 

One hopes that this and other errors will be corrected in a future edition of this book.

By their fruits

I just finished listening to The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D'Souza. If you are a student of history, politics, and competing worldviews, the book is worth reading, despite its provocative title.

As a foreign outsider, I cannot offer informed comment on the some of the information he presents, such as the academic question of whether Nazism is to be classified as a extreme left or extreme right ideology. However, I was astounded to learn that the Nuremberg race laws were partially based on the Jim Crow laws of the American South, Nazi eugenics programs being partially modeled on those in some American states, the idea for the Nazi genocides came from that which was perpetrated on Native Americans, and that the Democrats, who in the present time position themselves as the progressives, were historically the party of slavery and the Ku Klux Klan. There was what D'Souza terms as "two way traffic" between Nazism and the American left.

I will deal with the portions of this book that I am informed about. Atheists have often claimed that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, and that the Nazi movement was a Christian one. These claims do not stand up to historical scrutiny. D'Souza's earlier work has dealt with this question, and he addresses it again in this book.

D'Souza writes:

"Hitler's Table Talk, a revealing collection of the Fuhrer's private opinions, assembled by a close aide during the war years, shows Hitler to be rabidly anti-religious. He called Christianity one of the great "scourges" of history, and said of the Germans, "Let's be the only people who are immunized against this disease." He promised that "through the peasantry we shall be able to destroy Christianity." In fact, he blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity. He also condemned Christianity for its opposition to evolution.

Hitler reserved special scorn for the Christian values of equality and compassion, which he identified with weakness. Hitler's leading advisers like Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich and Bormann were atheists who hated religion and sought to eradicate its influence in Germany."

Here we have definitive statements from Hitler and other top ranking Nazis, clearly stating their contempt for Christianity and Christian ethics. To them, it was a disease that had to be eradicated. There is no way that they were Christians, not even in the broadest sense of the term. It is time that this fiction was stopped.