RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Yuval Levin is the founder of “National Affairs,” a director of the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. His belief is that we need to rebuild our institutions (“The durable forms of our common life”) – families, schools, universities, church, the military, civic organizations and legislatures – into the formative organizations they once were.”

The book (short at 204 pages) is divided into three parts – a description of the crisis, institutions in transition and a suggested path forward. “Everybody,” he writes in the introduction, “knows that Americans have long been losing faith in institutions.”  In losing faith, “…we have lost the words with which to speak about what we owe each other.” These institutions, which were once molds that formed who we were, have become platforms for those who use them for their own purposes. This is not the only problem confronting us, but it is the one, he writes, “…about which we tend to be most blind.”

Yuval Levin takes us through the political world where he claims problems are not so much ones of ideology, but of social psychology, “…unleashed and unmoored from institutional constraints.” Thirty pages of the book are devoted to campus culture where “…our degraded capacity for unity and solidarity is the result of a degraded capacity for accepting differences…The trouble is not that we have forgotten how to agree but that we have forgotten how to disagree.” Abetted by administrations and faculty inculcated with a culture of moral activism that does not allow for dissent, colleges graduate students endowed with a sense of political correctness that was “…utterly unfamiliar in the world of work until the last few years.” Writing of the effect of social media, Mr. Levin notes: “In some important respects, this has been an age of isolation not despite but because of social media.” Social media affirms us, rather than shape us. Shopping on-line is convenient, but is there the same sense of loyalty one has to real stores and the people who work in them?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/a_psychological_study_of_trump_worth_reading.html

“I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” —Samuel Johnson

Donald Trump inspires almost universal disapproval and scorn among wordsmith professionals in the mental health field.  He has been the target of diagnoses ranging from “pathological narcissism” to “bipolar disorder” to “dementia.”  

At last we can be grateful among the torrent of books about the president for one that justifies what Dr. Johnson called the “epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper.”

Sheldon Roth, M.D. has performed an important  service, not just to history, but to the field of depth psychology.  He has demonstrated ways in which it can illuminate the deep motivational wellsprings of a unique individual like Donald Trump.  His psycho-biography, Psychologically Sound: The Mind of Donald J. Trump, makes real and clear the truth of Wordsworth’s observation that “the child is father to the man.”

Trump is in the middle of a remarkable first term during which he has disrupted the various myths of our present-day wordsmith Utopians.  Their favored story has been of American decline, a decline well deserved by a racist and sexist country.  Donald Trump utterly dismissed this story, laughing at its politically correct absurdity.  His humor offends them while shattering their belief that presidents should be austere and solemn.  How did he manage to prevail in reviving American optimism, growing the economy while destroying the ISIS caliphate and reversing our appeasement policies toward Iran and China?  And he did all of this under constant siege by the wordsmith graduates of our elite universities and journalism schools.  Laughter and optimism helped.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/book-review-last-letters-what-real-resistance-looks-like/

A new translation of letters between a husband and wife who resisted the Nazis offers a portrait of steadfast grace and courage.

In 2020, it is not difficult to find books, podcasts, and other media about resisting fascism and living in a political dystopia. But not all “resistance” manuals are created equal. One recent addition should be lauded for offering more than a simple picture of oppression.

In Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence 1944–1945, Shelley Frisch faithfully translates a compilation of letters between Helmuth von Moltke and his wife, Freya, written between September 1944 and January 1945. The letters were exchanged during the months that Helmuth was in Tegel prison, in Berlin, and were carried in secret by the prison chaplain, Harald Polechau. The Moltkes’ stoic refusal to give in to spiritual or moral defeat, even in the face of Helmuth’s death, is striking.

Count Helmuth von Moltke was a law student in Berlin when Hitler rose to power in January 1933. Helmuth was the great-grand-nephew of the Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke the elder, a celebrated military commander, and was the great nephew of Helmuth von Moltke the younger, a German general during World War I.

https://mailchi.mp/7a206fee7c5e/bhw-2374242?e=a0fa704ef6

In American Ingrate, Federalist Senior Contributor Benjamin Weingarten exposes Ilhan Omar’s radical and revolutionary Left-Islamist agenda, her seminal role in the progressive takeover of the Democratic Party, and the dire threat she poses to U.S. national security by way of her collusion with subversive anti-American forces.

She says that America was “founded by the genocide of indigenous people and on the backs of slaves,” and that “ignorance really is pervasive” among Americans today.

She says America must “dismantle” capitalism and “demilitarize” U.S. foreign policy, which she sees “from the perspective of a foreigner,” tweeting “thousands of Somalis [were] killed by…American forces…#NotTodaySatan.”

She says American support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins baby;” and that American Jews disloyally pledge “allegiance” to Israel’s “apartheid…regime,” which has “hypnotized the world.”

She says of the 9/11 attacks: “some people did something.”

Shockingly, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) words merely scratch the surface of her hatred of America—and the West—and divert our gaze from the nefarious actions she is taking to sabotage it from within.

American Ingrate is the defining book on the size, scope, and nature of the threat posed by Representative Omar—the personification of the anti-American Left-Islamist nexus—heightened by her hidden collusion with like-minded adversaries foreign and domestic, and alleged criminality and corruption.

This is a clarion wakeup call to the dangers epitomized by Rep. Omar. For she is not merely a lone radical in Congress, but the archetype of the new Democratic Party—and a uniquely dangerous figure at the heart of a uniquely dangerous challenge to America.

Among other things, this heavily researched work:

Makes the definitive case that as President Trump has argued, Rep. Omar is the face of the Democratic Party, while delving deeply into her unexplored background, unchallenged beliefs, and under-appreciated effort in leading her party to advance a fundamentally subversive, intersectional- and identity politics-based agenda geared towards destroying our core institutions under the guise of “social justice;” 
Sets forth the argument that she not only personifies but leads the unholy progressive-Islamist alliance–held together by the glue of Jew-hatred as a proxy for hatred of Judeo-Christian Western civilization–that truly has triumphed over the Democratic establishment; and
Builds the as yet ignored case for her collusion with corrupt and anti-American actors and regimes foreign and domestic–on top of credible allegations of criminality and corruption, including previously unreported details pointing to her fraudulence

https://www.theepochtimes.com/impeachment-witness-marie-yovanovitch-gets-7-figure-book-deal_3247408.html

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a key witness in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, has signed a book deal.

Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt confirmed that it acquired the rights to Yovanovitch’s as-yet-untitled memoir.

The book will follow her career as a foreign service officer in Mogadishu, Somalia; Kyiv, Ukraine; and eventually Washington, “where, to her dismay, she found a political system beset by many of the same challenges she had spent her career combating overseas,” the publisher said in a statement.

“Yovanovitch’s book will deliver pointed reflections on the issues confronting America today, and thoughts on how we can shore up our democracy.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/03/09/civil-rights-law-and-the-rival-constitution/

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, by Christopher Caldwell (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $28)

“The Age of Entitlement is much more than a history of civil rights. Caldwell offers provocative and illuminating analyses of immigration and demographic change, the failures of Reaganism, the rise of Big Tech and the digitization of life, woke capitalism, and politicized philanthropy. Almost every page contains an arresting observation, a telling anecdote, or an interesting fact. This is revisionist conservative history at its best.”

There are many reasons the Right, in spite of the Republican Party’s electoral successes, steadily loses ground to the Left with each passing decade. The Left controls all the elite institutions that bestow praise and lay blame in America. It has a clarity of purpose, a resolve, and a ruthlessness that are generally lacking on the right. Most important though, it is the Left’s moral framework that is authoritative. Their pieties rule and are enforced by conservatives and liberals alike.

Nearly everyone in America either believes in or defers to the Left’s hierarchical politics of victimization. According to the country’s official mythology, in the beginning, only straight white men were free. Over time, marginalized members of the rainbow coalition gained more rights. American history, in this retelling, is progressive — yet tragic. Disparities in life outcomes between men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights prove that sexism, racism, and homophobia remain systemic.

In the spirit of John Rawls, America is to be judged by how its oppressed identity groups fare. Progressivism leads the charge in demanding more rights for more people, while conservatism is, at best, reduced to playing second fiddle in ministering to women and minorities. A rising tide lifts all boats — especially boats of color! As President Trump never tires of tweeting, the black and Hispanic unemployment rate is at an all-time low.

Non-accommodationist conservative arguments — anchored in the centrality of freedom, family, God, and country — lack a soil in which to take root. They are bound to fail — and fail they do, as the leftward drift of the country and of conservatism itself confirms. Robert Lewis Dabney’s biting words have proven prescient: “American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”

The Right will not stem its losses and reclaim the country until it upends the Left’s narrative. America needs a moral revolution and a different conceptual framework to think about its history. Hence the importance of Christopher Caldwell’s marvelously well-written and deliciously impious new counter-history of America since the Sixties, The Age of Entitlement.

Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, paves the way for such a transvaluation of values by calling into question the regime’s most sacred cow: civil rights. In his retelling, the civil-rights movement that justly destroyed Jim Crow did not bring equality to America. In a sad irony, it instead re-created the problem it promised to resolve, albeit in a modified form. America today once again has a system of government-backed racial preferences, except that blacks (and other recognized identity groups) are now its beneficiaries, while whites occupy “the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1927618134/

The late Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote “anti-Semitism is a light sleeper.”  Perhaps anti-Jewish sentiment dozed for a few years following the Holocaust, but it has awakened with fervor in Europe and in academia in America.

Most regrettably, in an election year anti-Semitism is manifestly ignored by the Democrat party which traditionally had resolutions condemning it in past decades.

Anti-Semitism is almost always ignited by a blood libel, a venal and false conspiracy theory, and more recently, the big lie that Jews occupied ancient Palestinian Arab lands exerting a brutal and oppressive “occupation.”

The big lie is fomented in academia by Arab funds, Moslem/Arab academics, and, alas, by preening and ignorant Jewish purveyors of blatant anti- Semitism and spurious history disguised as “social justice” initiatives.

In a highly readable and informative book “The Serpent and the Red Thread-The definitive Biography of Evil” Diane Weber Bederman traces the history of this ancient hatred and its resurgences from biblical times and the Garden of Eden, the Exile, inquisitions and crusades culminating in the Holocaust when one of every three Jews in the world was exterminated.

As Bederman remarks:

 ”What freezes the blood in one’s veins is the knowledge that the extermination of a people 3500 years old was calmly and meticulously planned over a period of time while the world watched.”

But the blood may well freeze with the blood curdling chants heard today:

”Khybar, Khaybar, O Zionists Hezbollah is coming soon! “

”Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader, the Qur’an is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

”Death to Israel!” Death to the Jews!”

And again the world just watches and listens to this evil.

History, the bible and religious prophecy combine in this excellent book-a wake up message that silence and apathy are collusion.

Diane Weber Bederman is an author, chaplain, journalist, blogger and speaker who is passionate about religion, ethics, politics, and mental health. She has been published in many media outlets including Huffington Post Canada, Times of Israel, Arutz Sheva and Canada Free Press. She is the author of three books. Back to the Ethic:Reclaiming Western Values; Anatomy of Fake News in the Era of Donald Trump; and The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil, now included in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Library in Israel. RSK