RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/lee_smiths_book_will_make_patriots_blood_boil.html

Lee Smith: The Plot against the President.  Center Street: New York, 2019.  368 pp., $17.34 hardcover, $14.99 Kindle.

Lee Smith’s The Plot against the President is an invaluable contribution to the history of America in the Trump era.  Built upon the role and perspective of California congressman Devin Nunes as the tip of the spear that would unravel and expose the coup plot and its co-conspirators, it’s a thorough chronicling of how the traditional American-bred gut instinct of a San Joaquin Valley, California farmer provided the spark of discernment that ultimately uncovered the lies and liars who perpetrated (and are still perpetrating) the worst scandal in American history.

Every congressman and senator, and every American voter, ought to read Smith’s book.  Americans who detest President Trump’s personality and decorum will remain free to continue, but if they are honest, they will be absolutely repelled by the behavior of the higher-ups in just about every so-called American “institution” — the CIA, FBI, DOJ, State Department, and mainstream media, and yes, the Obama White House.  Concocting lies and leaks to the media, fabricating evidence, running “humint” scams to develop further lies and leaks, manipulating courts by withholding evidence and declaring half-truths, carrying out orchestrated personal threats against Nunes and anyone else who dared to expose the truth — these are nothing short of organized crime activities, with each and every one of these institutions directly and knowingly involved.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/28/how-the-obama-administration-set-in-motion-democrats-coup-against-trump/

Rep. Devin Nunes realized the purpose of Obama’s dossier. ‘Devin figured out in December what was going on,’ says Langer. ‘It was an operation to bring down Trump.’

The following is an excerpt from Lee Smith’s book out October 29, “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History.”

AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the operation designed to undermine his campaign transformed. It became an instrument to bring down the commander in chief. The coup started almost immediately after the polls closed.

Hillary Clinton’s communications team decided within twenty-four hours of her concession speech to message that the election was illegitimate, that Russia had interfered to help Trump.

Obama was working against Trump until the hour he left office. His national security advisor, Susan Rice, commemorated it with an email to herself on January 20, moments before Trump’s inauguration. She wrote to memorialize a meeting in the White House two weeks before.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/10/is-there-no-field-in-which-the-jewish-mindset-doesnt-excel/

Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947Norman Lebrecht

More than 20 years ago, George Steiner, meditating on 2,000 years of persecution and suffering, posed the ‘taboo’ question that no one dared ask: ‘Has the survival of the Jew been worth the appalling cost?’  It was not just the horrors of the pogroms or of Auschwitz that ‘enforced’ the question for Steiner, nor the centuries of exclusion and violence but — equally destructive — ‘the fear, the degradation, the miasma of contempt, latent or explicit,’ which has been the hereditary birthright of every Jewish child ‘across the millennia’. ‘Would it not be preferable, on the balance sheet of human mercies,’ Steiner asked, ‘if he was to ebb into assimilation and the common seas?’

For the Orthodox believer, armed with the certainties of God’s covenant with His people, the question might not exist, but for those who cannot go down that road Norman Lebrecht’s urgent and moving history provides a different and stirring answer.  ‘Between the middle of the 19th and 20th centuries,’ Genius & Anxiety opens,

a few dozen men and women changed the way we see the world. Some of their names are on our lips for all time. Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka. Others have vanished from our collective memory, but their importance endures in our daily lives. Without Karl Landsteiner, for instance, there would be no blood transfusion or major surgery; without Paul Ehrlich no chemotherapy; without Siegfried Marcus no motor car; without Rosalind Franklin no model of DNA; without Fritz Haber there would not be enough food to sustain life on earth.

I don’t know if Lebrecht actually buys into so simple a description of scientific progress, or whether it is just a good, combative kick-off to a book, but either way the main thrust of the argument is inescapable. For the best part of the past 200 years a small and threatened minority has exerted a creative influence out of all proportion to their numbers, and whether they flaunt it like a Disraeli or a Bernstein, or a convert like Mendelssohn, whether they hate it like Marx, are religious or atheist, Orthodox or Reform, assimilist or Zionist, the one thing they share is their ‘Jewishness’. While it seems a difficult thing to define without slipping into tautology — a ‘Jewish aphorism’ or a ‘Jewish joke’ takes one as close as one is probably going to get — the one quality, for Lebrecht, that distinguishes the ‘Jewish mindset’ is the rabbinical, counter-intuitive ability to think ‘outside the box’. He is quick to refute any suggestion of Jewish ‘exceptionalism’, but whether in the end it is a matter of culture, hereditary experience or the eternal, driven angst of a people who could only fear the worst, the western world has every reason to be grateful to this astonishing explosion of talent.

https://www.lawliberty.org/liberty-classic/wanting-the-worst-helmut-schoeck-envy/

Peter Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003). He is also the 2019 recipient of the Jeane Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom.

“Let’s talk about envy. Give us some more beer…”

That’s Ivan, in Yuri Olesha’s short novel, Envy, published in 1927. Ivan is drawing the young and envious Nikolai further into a plot to disrupt Soviet society. His protégé, Nikolai Kavalero, dreams of glory but is stuck on the margins of society. He stews over the privileges and honors bestowed on others. Ivan feeds Nickolai’s envy, his sense of unfair exclusion.

Olesha’s novel is cited by Helmut Schoeck in his magisterial work, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, originally published in German in 1966 and republished by Liberty Fund in 1987. According to Schoeck, Olesha’s novel is a rarity in openly addressing this powerful and disruptive emotion. Envy, says Schoeck, is something we all feel but hardly ever talk about. Other negative emotions are granted a degree of public respect. We can admit to hatred, fear, and even jealousy, but envy is a quality we attribute only to others, whose envy is to be feared.

That’s because the envious have only one real goal: to see the people they envy brought low. In Schoeck’s telling, the envious man doesn’t want the good things—the house, the farm, the wife, the children—of the person he envies. He simply wants that person to lose those good things. The pleasure he looks forward to is the misery of his rival. The rival, moreover, need not even know he is the target of envy. The man who envies hides his resentment, typically by dressing it up in the clothes of altruism. He calls for “social justice,” for example, when what he really wants is to inflict suffering on the people he resents.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-meritocracy-trap

The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Daniel Markovits (Penguin Press, 448 pp., $30)

In 1958, the English sociologist Michael Young famously invented the term “meritocracy.” Sixty years later—after a financial crisis, a major recession, record-high inequality, and stubborn racial gaps have led to skepticism about opportunity in America—Young’s formulation is afire. In less than a decade, we’ve seen an outpouring of articles and books on meritocracy’s contribution to America’s ills.  The library includes MSNBC host (and Brown graduate) Chris Hayes’s Twilight of the Elites, Harvard law professor Lani Guinier’s The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and The Myth of the Meritocracy; soon to come is Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit.

The Meritocracy Trap, by Oxford-educated, Yale law professor Daniel Markovits, is the latest entry into this crowded arena. Markovits is fully aware of the irony of his resume, given his disgust with the system by which American society chooses its elites, and he’s got lots of company. As economist (yes, Harvard-educated ) Tyler Cowen has quipped: “The best critiques of the meritocracy have come from those with extreme merit.”  I’ll come back to this puzzle later, for it’s one that Markovits’s book, like others in the genre, doesn’t fully explore. 

The current meritocratic system began as an effort to open up a hereditary WASP elite to outsiders—and for a while, as immigrants, minorities, and women earned their way into America’s legacy campuses, writes Markovits, it looked like it was working more or less as intended. In the last few decades, however, the system has morphed into a do-or-die tournament for the prize of an Ivy League degree and a bonus-rich job at a swanky address. Instead of being democracies of talent, Harvard and Yale and their elite cronies are now quasi-exclusive clubs for the children of wealth. Money gives rich parents the means to groom their kids for these clubs as early as infancy with classes, books, and trips to museums meant to enhance kids’ development. They move to wealthy neighborhoods, where schools offer a vast array of (ahem) “enrichment” activities, including test prep and college-essay tutoring. Alternatively, they put their kids through 12 years of $40,000-a-year-plus private schools, whose administrators just happen to be chummy with Princeton admission officers.