RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/explosive_book_shows_how_fbi_and_media_destroyed_an_innocent_man.html

The Suspect by Kent Alexander and Kevin Salwen is a must-read book.  It details how Richard Jewell was accused of being the bomber at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.  Instead of being a hero for saving many lives, he became the main person of interest by the FBI and the press.  Former U.S. attorney Kent Alexander and former Wall Street Journal reporter Kevin Salwen reconstruct all the events leading up to, during, and after the Olympic bombing, showing how much of the law enforcement evidence was ignored, mainly because of tunnel vision.

Elise Cooper: Why did you write it now?

Kent Alexander: I have wanted to write this book for over two decades, ever since delivering Richard Jewell’s clearance letter.  My coauthor Kevin Salwen and I started reporting and writing The Suspect in earnest five and a half years ago.  This past November, we were finally ready to publish.

EC: Do you think that Jewell is still considered by many a suspect?

KA: Not by many, but a few.  One of our main characters, former FBI Special Agent Don Johnson, went to his grave convinced Richard Jewell was complicit in the Olympic bombing.  He was wrong.

EC: Do you think the press and media made Jewell out to be not the brightest?

KA: Yes.  Richard was no academic or intellectual, but he was a law enforcement professional who took his job quite seriously.  Sometimes overly so.  He prided himself on having a “seventh sense” to detect danger, and thank goodness he did.  He saved countless lives.  Richard Jewell is a bona fide hero.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-scientist-and-the-spy-review-agent-running-in-the-field-11581278582?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

In the fall of 2011, a farmer deep in Iowa corn country was so startled by an unusual sight that he called the cops. The alert sent over police radio went as follows: “South of here walking westbound there is an Asian male wearing a suit walking through a farm field. He was dropped off. Nature of incident: suspicious.”

It turned out that the man was dressed in khakis and a short-sleeve collared shirt, not a suit. But in a part of the state that was 97% white, it was the detail about the race of the man that was most salient. A sheriff’s deputy quickly intercepted the vehicle that had dropped the man off. Its driver, Chinese national Robert Mo, claimed that he and his associate were conducting agronomy research and looking at crops; in reality, they were trying to steal seed samples. The deputy let them go on their way. Soon, however, an FBI agent would place this same Robert Mo at the scene of a similarly suspicious episode from earlier in the year and in a different cornfield. And so was born an FBI investigation that illustrates a shift in American domestic intelligence—away from an all-consuming focus on terrorism and toward a heightened attentiveness to Chinese economic espionage.

In “The Scientist and the Spy,” Mara Hvistendahl, who spent years in Shanghai as a science reporter, uses the case of Robert Mo to explore America’s response to China’s commercial intelligence-gathering efforts. Early in the past decade, as Washington awoke to China’s theft of American industrial know-how, the FBI caseload for investigating such theft increased 50% from year to year. One expert that the author quotes, arguing against those who would relativize China’s activities by saying that rising powers have always stolen secrets from advanced nations, the U.S. included, observes: “In a manner of speaking, the United States stole books; China steals libraries.”

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/02/02/remembering-the-great-jewish-historian-ge

Gertrude Himmelfarb, prolific historian of the Victorian period, professor emeritus of history at City University of New York, graduate of New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College, student at both University of Chicago and Cambridge, and powerful voice for moral and political conservatism, died in December at her home in Washington, DC. She was 97 years old.

She belonged to one of the first families of American conservatism, broadly defined: She was the sister of Milton Himmelfarb, long a brilliant contributing editor at Commentary and the widow of conservative thinker Irving Kristol — with whom she had formed a husband-wife team to equal Lionel and Diana Trilling. Their son, William Kristol, was the influential editor of the now defunct Weekly Standard.

Himmelfarb also belonged to that remarkable knot of New York Jews who were the children of immigrants yet chose to relocate themselves imaginatively within a European culture: Irvin Ehrenpreis from Manhattan became the biographer of and supreme authority on Jonathan Swift; Lionel Trilling, from the Bronx, became the biographer of Matthew Arnold; and Brooklynite Himmelfarb became the biographer of statesman Lord Acton (not only English but Catholic).

Unlike Ehrenpreis and Trilling, Himmelfarb did not distance herself from her Jewish roots. Quite the contrary. She found and celebrated Jewish values that were deeply rooted within Victorian values, firm ideas of right and wrong, the recognition that “thou shalt not” predominates over “thou shalt.” It was that link which brought her to the attention of Margaret Thatcher, who had been derided by her “progressive” political opponents for embracing Victorian values as the foundation stone of British greatness.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/understanding-worlds-greatest-source-jew-hatred-allon-friedman/

During a public U.S. Congressional hearing held in April 2019, data was presented from a worldwide survey performed between 2014 and 2017 by the Anti-Defamation League that found the 16 nations with the highest prevalence of extreme antisemitism to all be Muslim countries in the Middle East. In response to the presentation of these data, the ADL’s Senior Vice President for Policy Eileen Hershenov had this to say: “vulnerable, marginalized communities have bigotry within them.” 

If explaining away Muslim Jew-hatred as somehow a result of vulnerability and marginalization in societies that are overwhelmingly Muslim strikes one as troubling, well it should; especially if the person doing the explaining represents an organization that claims “its timeless mission is to protect the Jewish people.” Any person with a healthy sense of self-preservation might ponder other questions that arise from this case. Like, for instance: Why is extreme antisemitism so ubiquitous in the Arab Muslim world? Or: Why is a prominent Jewish advocacy organization so intent on apologizing for Islamic Jew hatred? 

Unfortunately, anyone searching for answers to these timely questions is not going to find them anywhere in the public arena. In fact, a conspiracy of sorts has prevailed on college campuses, in Hollywood, in the establishment media, in think tanks, and in other cultural institutions, both Left and Right, where honest and open discussion of Islamic anti-Semitism is taboo because of the fear of social ostracism and professional suicide.

https://www.christianpost.com/voice/trump-an-unseen-christian-234772/

Did you know that President Donald J. Trump is Christian, believes in God, and has deep faith? Well, if you only read or watch mainstream media, you might not.  

Mainstream media would have you believe that unwavering support of Trump by evangelical Christians rests on politics: antiabortion, appointment of conservative judges, pro-Israel, the right to bear arms, a pledge “to safeguard students and teachers’ First Amendment rights to pray in our schools,” protection of religious free speech on campuses, or seasonal tidings of joy – “Merry Christmas.” This list does not inspire spiritual faith. Politics and religion may share aims, but at the same time, they are worlds apart. Politics cannot penetrate the meaning of Trump’s impassioned call in a Miami church: “In America we don’t worship government, we worship God!”

A Christian Charisma

Trump joins evangelicals through faith. Sustained faith cannot be faked, it is based on experience, a spiritual fact. Trump’s charisma in a church is not that of a visiting political potentate; he is energized by authentic Christian fire. What other major politician could speak for over an hour in an evangelical church with unscripted spontaneity, secure in Christian belief, moving in-and-out of conversation with congregants or pulling them to the pulpit as witnesses? Like his “I am one of you” rapport with blue collar workers based on long close contact in the construction world, when in the presence of evangelicals Trump is moved by a similar lived Christian experience that radiates from his pores.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/25/the-grubby-corruption-of-our-power-elite/

We all owe Peter Schweizer an enormous debt of gratitude for his enormous and effective labors in bringing sunlight to these tenebrous and mephitic climes.

In January 1956, John F. Kennedy published Profiles in Courage, biographical encomia to eight U.S. senators, from John Quincy Adams to Robert Taft, whom Kennedy thought exhibited conspicuous courage in the discharge of their public duties.

I say Kennedy published Profiles in Courage. But the book was written not by JFK but by the loyal Kennedy apparatchik and fixer Ted Sorensen. Sorenson, like so many in the Kennedy circle, was a bit thuggish. He was also an eloquent writer. Remember this famous bit from Kennedy’s inaugural? “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Nicely put, and it was put by Sorensen, merely read by Kennedy.

Anyway, Profiles in Courage was an early installment in that long-running (indeed, still-running) effort to obscure the distasteful reality of JFK with a carefully cultivated image of an eager yet culturally sophisticated patriot (see the index under “Pablo Casals visits the White House”).

Profiles in Courage deserves its place in that vast mythopoeic enterprise the public knows as Camelot. But a much more important book is Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elites.

Schweizer will be known to many readers of American Greatness. He is unquestionably our most accomplished anatomist of “using public power for personal gain. . . . cronyism, corruption, patronage, and intimidation.” His string of bestsellers includes Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, and Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison.