RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://asiatimes.com/author/spengler/

“Thane Rosenbaum, a distinguished law professor and prolific writer, proposes to set limits to free speech in order to protect it. The matter is a minefield, and he wades into it fearlessly. But I am not convinced that he has found a solution.”

Saving Free Speech From Itself, by Thane Rosenbaum. Fig Tree Books; 305 pages, Hardbound. US$24.95

With some trepidation and the dissent of men like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the founders of the United States included in its Constitution a guarantee of free speech unlike any other in the world. The First Amendment bars restrictions on public expression. That does not include speech or writing that amounts to an act of violence.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes set the standard for prohibited speech with the celebrated dictum that one does not have the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. The case in question was Schenck vs. United States, in which the court ruled that a defendant did not have the right to oppose mandatory conscription during the First World War. That shows how difficult it is to define violent speech: By today’s standards, verbal opposition to a government’s policy in wartime surely would be protected.

For the past 80 years, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chaplinsky vs. New Hampshire has defined prohibited speech as “the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or ‘fighting’ words – those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

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