RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/17/space-force-commanders-book-about-marxist-takeover-of-military-shoots-up-to-number-1-after-hes-fired-for-talking-about-it/

A new book about the Marxist takeover of the military shot to number one on Amazon’s best seller list after the author, a former commander of a U.S. Space Force unit, was fired for promoting it.

Lt Col. Matthew Lohmeier, commander of 11th Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, was relieved from his post after he appeared on a podcast to promote his book: “Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military.”

“Irresistible Revolution is a timely and bold contribution from an active-duty Space Force lieutenant colonel who sees the impact of a neo-Marxist agenda at the ground level within our armed forces,” a description of the book reads.

Lohmeier, a former instructor and fighter pilot, was tasked with detecting ballistic missile launches.

He was fired on Friday for comments he made on national security expert L. Todd Wood’s podcast “Information Operation” last week, according to Military.com.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/14/josh-hawleys-book-debuts-as-top-10-bestseller-despite-cancellation-attempts/

Sen. Josh Hawley’s new book, “The Tyranny of Big Tech” is selling at rapid rates following a cancellation attempt by Simon and Schuster in January for his stance on election integrity.

According to Publishers Weekly, Hawley’s book ranks sixth in the nation for hardcover frontlist nonfiction. Since the book was released on May 4, Hawley has sold nearly 21,000 copies and shows no sign of slowing down. In its first week on Amazon’s “Top 20 Most Sold & Most Read Books of the Week” list, Hawley’s book ranked number 15.

The Washington-based Regnery Publishing company made a deal with Hawley shortly after New York-based Simon and Schuster canceled their deal with the senator one day after the Capitol riot due to a “pressure campaign organized by leftist activists.” Their reasoning for pulling back on the deal, Simon and Schuster claimed without evidence, was that Hawley is linked to the storming of Capitol because he publicly questioned the 2020 election results.

Hawley’s book outlines how corporate America uses its influence to “cancel me and to cancel or control the speech, the communication, even the ideas of millions of Americans—all Americans, in a sense, because what the woke capitalists want, along with their allies in government, is to preserve their power over American politics and society.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/05/13/the-great-reject-n1446584

We know from Klaus Schwab, Chair of the World Economic Forum that meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, and architect of the Great Reset which envisions the entire re-making of Western society into a globalist oligopoly, that the pandemic is largely a manufactured crisis. COVID-19 is not “an existential threat,” he writes in COVID-19: The Great Reset; in fact, it is “one of the least deadly pandemics the world has experienced in the last 2000 years.” Strategic chicanery has become the order of the day. According to Schwab, the COVID crisis must be weaponized to deceive and suppress a credulous population and to stifle dissent in order to bring about the total restructuring of Western societies. COVID is the stalking horse behind which the true purpose of the revolutionary scheme and prospectus advances.

World governments and public health organizations have complied with the Davos agenda, mobilizing a veritable arsenal of tactical ordnance in the service of the larger plan. The disease constitutes “our defining moment,” Schwab exults, as the world’s political and medical peerage prepared to launch a four-pronged attack on the free-market West: mask mandates, perpetual lockdowns, defective PCR testing protocols and controversial if not toxic vaccines. Almost everything government officials and public health authorities have stipulated and enforced has been engineered to create an unprecedented catastrophe.

Entire populations will be demoralized and deprived of agency, the entrepreneurial and self-employed middle class will be effectively phased out, and the ethos of individuality and self-reliance will succumb to a global collectivity. “You will own nothing and be happy” is the operative watchword. Only the political, technocratic and plutocratic elite will be spared, as Patrick Wood explains in Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation. This in a nutshell is the Great Reset. It sounds like a conspiracy theory aching to be debunked—the BBC’s considers the Reset as a laudable plan to restore the world’s economy rather than a “baseless conspiracy…which claims a group of world leaders orchestrated the pandemic to take control of the global economy.” The BBC perspective, among similar take-down efforts by many other Leftist venues, is wholly predictable. But a reading of Schwab’s various books detailing the project, in particular COVID-19: The Great Reset and Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the complicity of major international players like Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson, Al Gore, Prince Charles, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and a host of others, as well as the backing of Time Magazine, Greenpeace International, BP, etc., make it abundantly clear that an insurrectionary program is afoot.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/religion-holidays/2021/05/loss-discovery-

Hillel Halkin

Parent-child collaborations are extremely rare in literary history. Of grandparent-grandchild collaborations, I had never heard—never, that is, until the publication this spring of Reading Ruth: Birth, Redemption, and the Way of Israel, a slim book jointly written by the eminent American-Jewish thinker, author, Bible commentator, and Mosaic contributor Leon Kass and his granddaughter Hannah Mandelbaum. As told by Kass in a brief preface:

We did not start out intending to write a book. We began it, in the fall of 2015, to give comfort to each other following the death of our beloved Amy Apfel Kass—wife of 54 years to Leon, grandmother (“Gaga”) of sixteen years to Hannah. Leon was living, then as now, in Washington, D.C.; Hannah was living, then as now, in Jerusalem. The idea was Hannah’s, suggested in one of her daily calls: “Zeydeh,” she said, “perhaps you would like to read something with me.” Leon grabbed the offer: a log brought to a drowning man. We settled easily and quickly on the book of Ruth. Not only was it short and lovely. It also had special meaning for Leon. Some twenty years earlier, Amy and he had made a discovery in the book of Ruth that they thought might be the key to understanding its meaning, and they had spoken about working on it in the future. But that future never arrived, and Leon had forgotten the insight. He was therefore particularly keen to see whether, with Hannah’s help, it could be recovered.

And so one begins Reading Ruth with a set of questions. What was Leon and Amy Kass’s insight? Will Leon recover it? And how can Hannah help him to do this? It is almost like starting a suspense novel.

Although there are many ways of reading Ruth, they all fall into two basic categories.  One, more appealing to modern sensibilities, is to view it as a love story, the tale of a widowed young Moabite who tells her mother-in-law Naomi, a widow herself, “Whither you go, I shall go. . . . Your people is my people and your God, my God.” Ruth joins Naomi in returning from Moab to her native town of Bethlehem in Judea; lives there with her in poverty and isolation; catches the admiring eye of the unmarried Boaz, a kinsman of Naomi’s late husband Elimelech and a leading citizen of the town, when he notices her foraging for the grain left behind by the harvesters in his fields; is drawn to him in return; and, in the end, following a dramatic night of romantic confession, is happily wed to him and bears him a son who turns out to be the grandfather of King David.

The second and more traditional way of reading Ruth, best exemplified by rabbinic exegesis, is as a narrative of religious faith, personal virtue, and obedience to God’s commandments, for their exemplification of which Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz are rewarded with the ancestry of Israel’s greatest king. And since the Moabites, according to the Bible, are Israel’s bitter foes with whom it is forbidden to mingle, there are also two ways of thinking about Ruth’s Moabite identity. Its function in the story can be said to champion acceptance of the stranger, no matter how hateful his or her background, or to extol the determination of the proselyte who overcomes such a background in order to cleave to a new people and its God.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/10/patriotic-bore-god-and-country-at-yale/

A review of “Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes” by Steven B. Smith
(Yale University Press, 256 pages, $28)

This is a tough time to be a patriot. In “Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” Glenn Ellmers charges that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Ellmers’ shocking yet compelling argument, further elaborated at American Greatness, is the sort of “extremism” that appalls Steven Smith, who also believes that patriotism is not enough and wants to save it from Ellmers as well as from those he deems the opposite extremes at the “1619 Project” and Black Lives Matter. The problem that haunts the book is whether Smith’s positioning himself in the middle reduces patriotism into a middling mediocrity, lacking passion, conviction, and persuasiveness. 

But Smith’s middle is the not-mediocre Yale University—the book is devoted to a recent past president of the university—where Smith has taught political philosophy for over 30 years. He laments that the inscription “For God, for Country, for Yale” is now but a “quaint reminder of a benighted past,” as is his former title of “master” of Branford College. Smith sees his challenge today as saving his readers at Yale and beyond from the regnant “dehumanizing” extremes of MAGA nationalism, on the one hand, and BLM, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. 

In his view, neither extreme respects “the specificity of what it is to be an American and a patriot.” Since Yale is scarcely threatened by white nationalists—as much as some students there may fancy it is—one must understand his book’s mission to focus on cosmopolitan identity politics’ threat to patriotism and its repurposing of spiritedness and minds. He thus echoes the NeverTrump and establishment academic view of patriotism as reducible to belief in an American creed. 

“This book is for this moment,” the preface warns. Smith will conclude his book with “American patriotism is aspirational,” especially in the “enlightened” form on which his book is focused. He identifies patriotism as a form of loyalty, a feeling of care for others that all human beings need to display in order to fulfil their political and social natures. 

But loyalty tests the heart as well as the head. Such loyalty resembles that of a family, with “both good and bad” creating a distinct ethos—Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory.” Americans’ loyalty is to those twin principles of equality and liberty that make up the American creed. Yet at the same time loyalty also requires grounding in place and shared sentiments. Patriotism is thus both love of the Good and love of one’s own, it involves both philosophic striving and familial rootedness, meaning there will be both profound debates and irksome squabbles, a neverending odyssey and utter devotion to the homeland. Here the book dissolves into inchoate impressions, for it doesn’t consider America as embodying the best regime, as Harry Jaffa has urged: “The unprecedented character of the American Founding is that it provided for the coexistence of the claims of reason and of revelation in all their forms, without requiring or permitting any political decisions concerning them.”