Search results for ""Encounter Books,USA""

This book offers eight clear-sighted essays critical of racial “diversity” preferences in American higher education. Unlike more conventional books on the subject, which are essentially apologies for racial reverse discrimination, this volume forthrightly exposes the corrosive effects of identity politics on college and university life.The fact-filled and hard-hitting chapters are by Heather Mac Donald, Peter N. Kirsanow, Peter W. Wood, Lance Izumi and Rowena Itchon, John Ellis, Carissa Mulder, and the editors Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzschild.

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The United States and China are locked in a “cold tech war,” and the winner will end up dominating the twenty-first century.Beijing was not considered a tech contender a decade ago. Now, some call it a leader. America is already behind in critical areas.It is no surprise how Chinese leaders made their regime a tech powerhouse. They first developed and then implemented multiyear plans and projects, adopting a determined, methodical, and disciplined approach. As a result, China’s political leaders and their army of technocrats could soon possess the technologies of tomorrow.America can still catch up. Unfortunately, Americans, focused on other matters, are not meeting the challenges China presents. A whole-of-society mobilization will be necessary for the U.S. to regain what it once had: control of cutting-edge technologies. This is how America got to the moon, and this is the key to winning this century.Americans may not like the fact that they’re once again in a Cold War–type struggle, but they will either adjust to that reality or get left behind.

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The election of Donald Trump in 2016 didn’t just shock the country, it jolted the Republican Party and forced an overdue reckoning between rank-and-file Republicans and party leadership. Long-held beliefs promoted by the Republican Party establishment were smashed in real time as Republican voters, and millions of Obama voters especially in the Midwest, rejected the bi-party consensus on illegal immigration, international trade pacts, and losing foreign wars. The GOP—and the conservative movement—was upended by a brash Manhattan mogul who connected with coveted working-class voters in a way no other Republican presidential candidate had in three decades.Stung by his ascendancy as Republican voters rejected one establishment candidate after another during the presidential primaries, exiled conservative leaders banded together to form what is known as “NeverTrump.” This cabal of self-proclaimed conservatives includes two former Republican presidential nominees, former Republican lawmakers and Bush administration officials, campaign consultants, and editors and writers at top conservative publications. After failing to stop Trump in 2016, NeverTrump became part of #TheResistance, a crusade primarily organized by the Left to sabotage Trump’s presidency. The very same people who had used the Republican Party as their vehicle for power, fame, and influence are actively working to destroy the party’s leader and punish Trump-supporting Republicans in Washington. NeverTrump helped deceive the public about nonexistent Russian election collusion and supported impeaching the president. Some jumped on the Left’s mob against Brett Kavanaugh and the Covington Catholic High School students. NeverTrump opposed nearly every Trump policy without offering any alternative to what they derisively called “Trumpism.” At the same time, NeverTrump became what they claimed to despise about Donald Trump: petty, vengeful, bombastic, reactionary, and abusive. As a result, it’s imperative that those associated with NeverTrump never hold a place of influence in the GOP again.

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David Pryce-Jones weaves a vivid life story through vignettes of the many famous authors—friends, acquaintances, interview subjects—who gave him personally inscribed books. In Signatures he offers a window onto the lives and work of these extraordinary people.As a child, Pryce-Jones spent time at Isaiah Berlin’s house. As a teenager, lunching with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, he prompted an outburst about Parisian anti-Semitism. W. H. Auden found him at Oxford to praise his competition poem, and he later visited Auden in his loft studio in Austria. Svetlana Alliluyeva reminisced about her father, Joseph Stalin, while staying at the Pryce-Jones house in Wales.A highbrow salon gathered in the home of Arthur Koestler, who strove to be an English gentleman and who was with Pryce-Jones in Reykjavik covering the Fischer-Spassky chess match. Saul Bellow spoke of an old friend, now a capo famiglia, promising to deal with student rioters in 1968 Chicago. After swapping houses with Pryce-Jones one summer, Jessica Mitford insisted that he would have been a Communist in the 1930s. Robert Graves challenged a quotation from Virgil, and told the Queen that she was a descendant of Muhammad.We meet V. S. Naipaul, a free spirit who understood that “the world is what it is.” Muriel Spark would come round for lunch with the Pryce-Joneses in Florence, enjoying conspiratorial stories about Italian politics. At his sepulchral home in Heidelberg, Albert Speer demonstrated his way of “admitting a little to deny a great deal.” In Isaac Singer we see generosity, candor, and mischievous humor. This is only a small sampling of the remarkable personalities who have left their signatures on a fascinating life.

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In April of 2002, a mosque in Cambridge, MA run by the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) posted an appeal on its website: “Chechen refugee family needs temporary place to live until they complete their permanent refugee status in the US. Husband has good business knowledge, auto-mechanic experience and construction.” Contrary to the Islamic Society of Boston’s claims, taken entirely at face value by most media, that the Tsarnaev brothers only briefly and occasionally attended its Cambridge mosque over the year or so before they bombed the Boston Marathon, the Tsarnaevs were already involved with the ISB in April of 2002 – the month that they arrived in the United States. The family, which was not religious when it arrived in America, began regularly praying at the ISB mosque and turned increasingly fundamentalist. This fits an alarming pattern: Since 9/11, fourteen leaders and members of the ISB have either been imprisoned, killed by law enforcement, or declared fugitives for their involvement in Islamic terrorism. The stories of the Tsarnaev brothers have been told in countless places. The story of the mosque that they attended during their increasing radicalization – and the organization that runs it – has not been told in any meaningful way yet. Terror in the Cradle of Liberty documents the rise of Islamist networks within New England’s historically-moderate and century-old Muslim community since the 1960s. It contains a detailed and personal account of the efforts by Massachusetts activists since 2002 to expose and counter the influence of Islamist networks in New England – even as Jewish, political, and law enforcement leaders in the Bay State have decided to embrace these networks as interfaith and community allies.

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Most American young people, like their ancestors, harbor desires for a worthy life: a life of meaning, a life that makes sense. But they are increasingly confused about what such a life might look like, and how they might, in the present age, be able to live one. With a once confident culture no longer offering authoritative guidance, the young are now at sea—regarding work, family, religion, and civic identity. The true, the good, and the beautiful have few defenders, and the higher cynicism mocks any innocent love of wisdom or love of country. We are supercompetent regarding efficiency and convenience; we are at a loss regarding what it’s all for.Yet because the old orthodoxies have crumbled, our “interesting time” paradoxically offers genuine opportunities for renewal and growth. The old Socratic question “How to live?” suddenly commands serious attention. Young Americans, if liberated from the prevailing cynicism, will readily embrace weighty questions and undertake serious quests for a flourishing life. All they (and we) need is encouragement.This book provides that necessary encouragement by illuminating crucial—and still available—aspects of a worthy life, and by defending them against their enemies. With chapters on love, family, and friendship; human excellence and human dignity; teaching, learning, and truth; and the great human aspirations of Western civilization, it offers help to both secular and religious readers, to people who are looking on their own for meaning and to people who are looking to deepen what they have been taught or to square it with the spirit of our times.

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America's Revolutionary Mind is the first major reinterpretation of the American Revolution since the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic. The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before 1776. The Declaration is used here as an ideological road map by which to chart the intellectual and moral terrain traveled by American Revolutionaries as they searched for new moral principles to deal with the changed political circumstances of the 1760s and early 1770s. This volume identifies and analyzes the modes of reasoning, the patterns of thought, and the new moral and political principles that served American Revolutionaries first in their intellectual battle with Great Britain before 1776 and then in their attempt to create new Revolutionary societies after 1776. The book reconstructs what amounts to a near-unified system of thought—what Thomas Jefferson called an “American mind” or what I call “America’s Revolutionary mind.” This American mind was, I argue, united in its fealty to a common philosophy that was expressed in the Declaration and launched with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

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Common sense is the foundation of thinking and of human action. It is the indispensable basis for making our way in the world as individuals and in community with others, and the starting point for finding truth and building scientific knowledge. The philosophy of common-sense realism deeply informed the American Founders’ vision for a self-governing people, in a society where leaders and average citizens share essentially the same understanding of reality—of what simply makes sense. But today our confidence in the value and reliability of common sense has been badly shaken. Deep thinkers have rejected it. Elites have learned to disdain it. We’re told that we have moved into a more sophisticated world, where common sense is passé and the very concept of truth is outmoded. Indeed, the Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as the Word of the Year for 2016. Do we actually live in a post-truth reality? Have we moved beyond common sense? Can we? In this book, Robert Curry exposes the absurdity of the attacks on common sense, and demonstrates that we still live and move in the realm of common sense in our every waking moment. Drawing from philosophy and literature, science and psychiatry, Reclaiming Common Sense helps us regain our trust in the “superpower” we all have in common, while reminding us that we cannot get along without it.

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The entire foreign policy and much of the domestic policy of the United States and other Western governments is based on the proposition that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and peaceful, including those who are emigrating in large numbers to Europe and North America. But as Islamist groups and many mosques radicalize peaceful Muslims and appeal to the teachings of the Koran, Hadith, and Sunnah, it is imperative for moderates and reformists to articulate a vision of Islam and an exegesis of Islamic texts that can withstand the challenge of Islamists and the ulema who have declared the sanctity and immutability of the text. Instead, they must reestablish a firm foundation of Islam that is modernized, genuinely peaceful, tolerant, pluralistic, and compatible with secular governance, the freedom of speech, human rights, and equality.The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is the first major effort to provide that foundation. Veteran journalist Christine Douglass-Williams interviews foremost moderate and reformist Muslims in the Western world. She asks them tough questions about how they deal with problematic Koran passages, how they intend to get their message across to the Muslim world, and more. Their answers are revelatory, even in the ways in which they disagree with one another. Douglass-Williams has captured the Islamic Reformist movement in its full intellectual ferment, laying bare the tensions and triumphs of the Reformers. In the book's second half, she adds a crucial series of searingly honest and illuminating reflections on the challenges the reformers face, the chances they have of succeeding, and the implications of their struggle for the future of the Western world and of all free people.Illuminating, engaging, and thought-provoking, The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is an essential text for understanding the future of the United States and the West, and the implications of Muslim moderates' struggle for the free world.

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Tomorrow has never looked better. Breakthroughs in fields like genetic engineering and nanotechnology promise to give us unprecedented power to redesign our bodies and our world. Futurists and activists tell us that we are drawing ever closer to a day when we will be as smart as computers, will be able to link our minds telepathically, and will live for centuries--or maybe forever. The perfection of a "posthuman" future awaits us. Or so the story goes. In reality, the rush toward a posthuman destiny amounts to an ideology of human extinction, an ideology that sees little of value in humanity except the raw material for producing whatever might come next. In Eclipse of Man, Charles T. Rubin traces the intellectual origins of the movement to perfect and replace the human race. He shows how today's advocates of radical enhancement are--like their forebears--deeply dissatisfied with given human nature and fixated on grand visions of a future shaped by technological progress. Moreover, Rubin argues that this myopic vision of the future is not confined to charlatans and cheerleaders promoting this or that technology: it also runs through much of modern science and contemporary progressivism. By exploring and criticizing the dreams of post humanity, Rubin defends a more modest vision of the future, one that takes seriously both the limitations and the inherent dignity of our given nature.

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The theme of The Great Divide is that the populations of the democratic world, from Boston to Berlin, Vancouver to Venice, are becoming increasingly divided from within, due to a growing ideological incompatibility between modern liberalism and conservatism. This is partly due to a complex mutation in the concept of liberal democracy itself, and the resulting divide is now so wide that those holding to either philosophy on a whole range of topics: on democracy, on reason, on abortion, on human nature, on homosexuality and gay marriage, on freedom, on the role of courts ...and much more, can barely speak with each other without outrage (the favorite emotional response from all sides). Clearly, civil conversation at the surface has been failing -- and that could mean democracy is failing. This book is an effort to deepen the conversation. It is written for the non-specialist, and aims to reveal the less obvious underlying ideological forces and misconceptions that cause the conflict and outrage at the surface -- not with any expectation the clash of values will evaporate, but rather that a deeper understanding will generate a more intelligent and civil conversation. As an aid to understanding, the book contains a handful of Tables directly comparing modern liberal and conservative views across a range of fundamental moral and political "issues" so that curious readers can answer the book's main question: "Where Do You Stand?" An interesting result in testing this exercise has been the number of people who find they "think" one way, but "live" another.

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One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was that miserable victims of communist regimes would climb walls, swim rivers, dodge bullets, and find other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time that progressive intellectuals would sentimentally proclaim that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is playing out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from Third World nations pour into Western states, academics and intellectuals present Western life as a nightmare of inequality and oppression. In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia's love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere "politico-moral" posturing about admired ethical causes--from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one's essential decency by having the correct opinions has become a substitute for individual moral responsibility. Instead, Minogue argues, we ask that our governments carry the burden of solving our social--and especially moral--problems for us. The irony is that the more we allow the state to determine our moral order, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think. Such is the servile mind.

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In this book, Jay Nordlinger gives a history of what the subtitle calls "the most famous and controversial prize in the world." The Nobel Peace Prize, like the other Nobel prizes, began in 1901. So we have a neat, sweeping history of the 20th century, and about a decade beyond. The Nobel prize involves a first world war, a second world war, a cold war, a terror war, and more. It contends with many of the key issues of modern times, and of life itself. It also presents a parade of interesting people--more than a hundred laureates, not a dullard in the bunch. Some of these laureates have been historic statesmen, such as Roosevelt (Teddy) and Mandela. Some have been heroes or saints, such as Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. Some belong in other categories--where would you place Arafat? Controversies also swirl around the awards to Kissinger, Gorbachev, Gore, and Obama, to name just a handful. Probably no figure in this book is more interesting than a non-laureate: Alfred Nobel, the Swedish scientist and entrepreneur who started the prizes. The book also addresses "missing laureates," people who did not win the peace prize but might have, or should have (Gandhi?). Peace, They Say is enlightening and enriching, and sometimes even fun. It has its opinions, but it also provides what is necessary for readers to form their own opinions. What is peace, anyway? All these people who have been crowned "champions of peace," and the world's foremost--should they have been? Such is the stuff this book is made on.

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Well known as a political commentator and the author of sixteen novels, William F. Buckley Jr. was also a superb chronicler of travel. Getting About gathers more than one hundred of his articles about journeys by boat, train, or plane, representing a lifetime of adventure around the world—from Annapolis to Zurich, from the Azores to the Virgin Islands.An elegant jet-setter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing. He took first place in the Magazine Article on Foreign Travel category in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition for eight pieces written while “Concording around the world” in 1989. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining pieces full of exuberance and authority. Being a Bach afficionado, he composed his sentences for a well-tuned ear.Buckley’s talent for arranging a mise-en-scène stands out in accounts of riding the Orient Express, skiing at Alta, or vacationing at Barbuda. Though himself a central character in the story, he never dominates it. He wrote candidly about travel misadventures, as when his sixty-foot schooner broke down in the Bahamas and was towed to Miami by a Coast Guard cutter, or when a malfunctioning compass landed his boat on a rocky shoal off Rhode Island and the Coast Guard said, “Sorry, we can’t help you.” He also took a gimlet eye to the travel industry and a discriminating palate to airline food, suggesting that airports sell “a really good box lunch” with celery rémoulade, fresh figs, and a nice Bordeaux.Getting About is pure enjoyment, but it also broadens the significance of Buckley’s œuvre. Along with Bill Meehan’s illuminating introduction, this delightful collection helps preserve Buckley’s legacy as his centenary, in 2025, approaches.

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Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging. The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes—a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates. Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers—a vast, expanding property-less population. The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them—if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them.

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Former Director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey and former Romanian acting spy chief Lt. General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who was granted political asylum in the U.S. in 1978, describe why Russia remains an extremely dangerous force in the world, and they finally and definitively put to rest the question of who killed President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.All evidence points to the fact that the assassination—carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald—was ordered by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, acting through what was essentially the Russian leader’s personal army, the KGB (now known as the FSB). This evidence, which is codified as most things in foreign intelligence are, has never before been jointly decoded by a top U.S. foreign intelligence leader and a former Soviet Bloc spy chief familiar with KGB patterns and codes.Meanwhile, dozens of conspiracy theorists have written books about the JFK assassination during the past fifty-six years. Most of these theories blame America and were largely triggered by the KGB disinformation campaign implemented in the intense effort to remove Russia’s own fingerprints that blamed in turn Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, secretive groups of American oilmen, Howard Hughes, Fidel Castro, and the Mafia.Russian propaganda sowed hatred and contempt for the U.S. quite effectively, and its operations have morphed into many forms, including the recruitment of global terror groups and the backing of enemy nation- states. Yet it was the JFK assassination, with its explosive aftermath of false conspiracy theories, that set the model for blaming America first.

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The defeat of South Vietnam was arguably America's worst foreign policy disaster of the 20th Century. Yet a complete understanding of the endgame--from the 27 January 1973 signing of the Paris Peace Accords to South Vietnam's surrender on 30 April 1975--has eluded us. Black April addresses that deficit. A culmination of exhaustive research in three distinct areas: primary source documents from American archives, North Vietnamese publications containing primary and secondary source material, and dozens of articles and numerous interviews with key South Vietnamese participants, this book represents one of the largest Vietnamese translation projects ever accomplished, including almost one hundred rarely or never seen before North Vietnamese unit histories, battle studies, and memoirs. Most important, to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of South Vietnam's conquest, the leaders in Hanoi released several compendiums of formerly highly classified cables and memorandum between the Politburo and its military commanders in the south. This treasure trove of primary source materials provides the most complete insight into North Vietnamese decision-making ever complied. While South Vietnamese deliberations remain less clear, enough material exists to provide a decent overview. Ultimately, whatever errors occurred on the American and South Vietnamese side, the simple fact remains that the country was conquered by a North Vietnamese military invasion despite written pledges by Hanoi's leadership against such action. Hanoi's momentous choice to destroy the Paris Peace Accords and militarily end the war sent a generation of South Vietnamese into exile, and exacerbated a societal trauma in America over our long Vietnam involvement that reverberates to this day. How that transpired deserves deeper scrutiny.

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The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation State argues that to preserve our freedom Americans must mount a defense of the nation state against the progressive forces who advocate for global government. The Founders of America were convinced that freedom would flourish only in a nation state. A nation state is a collection of citizens who share a commitment to the same principles. Today, the nation state is under attack by the progressive Left, who allege that it is the source of almost every evil in the world.

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Western civilization fashioned a capitalism that created a worldwide economic cornucopia and higher standards of living than any other system, yet its legitimacy is often questioned by its beneficiaries. Boston University Emeritus Professor Angelo M. Codevilla, proclaims Donald Devine’s The Enduring Tension between Capitalism and the Moral Order, “the best answer to this question since Adam Smith’s. Like Smith, Devine shows the mutually sustaining nature of morality and economic freedom, and provides a much-needed clearing away of the confusion with which recent authors have befogged this essential relationship.” Devine begins with Karl Marx setting capitalism’s roots in feudalism and the implications of that traditionalist inheritance, finally transformed by Rousseau’s “Christian heresy,” which turned the vision of heavenly perfection into an impossibly perfect ideal for earthly society. To unravel this capitalist enigma, Devine identifies the roots of the confusion, critiques the rationalized responses, and identifies the remedy—the revival of an historical Lockean pluralism able to fuse a moral scaffolding sufficient to hold the walls and preserve the best of capitalist civilization.

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This provocative book dispels social cliches and spotlights biological realities.

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This book exposes the charlatanry that fuels much academic art history today and leaks into the art world generally.

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Revel probes the origins of the notion that America is the source of all evil: imperialistic, greedy, ruthlessly competitive - a hyperpower whose riches are acquired at the expense of the Third World.

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Rob Stearn' inspiring perspectives come at a time when many businesses, organizations, and individuals seek practical insights regarding how to recover from major losses. Why do some companies rally after competitive disasters? Why do some individuals rebound after personal defeats? Winning after losing big is hard. Stearns' refreshing approach stimulates recovery by provoking you and your enterprise to reinvigorate your thinking and your response to losing. Rob Stearns understands losing and winning. As a successful entrepreneur and executive, he also experienced the trauma and loneliness of professional and personal defeat. Winning Smart after Losing Big will stimulate you and your organization to: * Adjust your traditional thinking about suffering a loss * Separate the act of losing from the consequences of losing * Recognize when you are losing * Choose when to lose * Identify the causes of your loss * Explore your thoughts and feelings about your loss * Escape the "loop" of reliving your loss * Redefine what winning means to you * Rely on yourself to select the right help * Create personal independence at the moment when you need it most

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J. Bowyer Bell takes us back to the cradle of Muslim discontent, revealing how Islamic terror arose along the Nile a century ago amidst the grievances of an Egypt held in bondage by foreign imperialists and local despots.

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In this riveting book, Masetti takes the reader inside the war room of the Cuban revolution. His life involved international revolutionary intrigue: smuggling diamonds and ivory; counterfeiting U.S. dollars; trafficking in narcotics. He served in Angola and other war zones in the 1980s. He was an adviser with groups such as the M-19 guerrillas in Columbia and the Sandinistas.

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Is the Electoral College “racist” and a “scam” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims? Or was Alexander Hamilton right when he declared that “if it be not perfect, it is at least excellent”? In this Broadside, Trent England explains why we have the Electoral College, how it shapes American politics, and why preserving it is necessary to maintain our republican form of government. With an organized campaign trying to hijack the constitution’s state-by-state system in favor of a direct election, now is the time for Americans to come to the defense of the Electoral College.

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Progressives have taught us that it doesn’t take overt discrimination to make society unfair. Privilege afforded to different groups—such as whites, males, and heterosexuals—can infect our cultural institutions, creating unfair burdens for other groups. But one form of privilege has been overlooked: progressive privilege. Today, the progressive worldview is depicted as what is normal, right, and worth celebrating by our cultural institutions. Conservatives are marginalized and stereotyped in entertainment, news, academia, and throughout our culture. Progressive privilege isn’t just unfair to conservatives; it has warped our entire political environment and made our country more divided. Recognizing progressive privilege is the first step to ending it, so that we can have a fairer, more truly inclusive society.

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As 2018 ended, an orchestrated propaganda campaign paralyzed U.S. foreign policy. The trigger was the killing in Istanbul of Jamal Khashoggi, a member of Saudi Arabia’s wealthy and politically powerful oligarchy. Mainstream media and misguided, melodramatic politicians hoodwinked millions by portraying Khashoggi as a martyr for press freedom and democracy. The real Khashoggi was nothing of the sort. President Trump’s efforts to restore realism to foreign policy must contend not only with Democrats but also with naïve Republicans who reject the national-interest realism of Jeane Kirkpatrick, author of “Dictatorships and Double Standards.”

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What happens when a leading conservative economist goes mano a mano with today's most influential exponent of left-liberal economics, over free markets versus government interventionism? Here are highlights of that showdown between Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation and Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate. Moore and Krugman sparred over eight major economic issues in our national debate -- from whether the policy response to the crisis of 2008 was successful, to the outlook for Obamacare, to the "red state / blue state" divide. The contest was cordial and spiced with wit. (Does air conditioning explain the migration from blue to red states? Is Houston still uninhabitable?) This high-powered matchup illuminates a clash of worldview that leads to opposing policy prescriptions. More important, it will help you draw conclusions about which economic policies work.

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Progressive Racism is about the transformation of the civil rights movement from a cause opposing racism--the denigration of individuals on the basis of their skin color - into a movement endorsing race preferences and privileges for select groups based on their skin color. It describes the tragic changes of this cause under the leadership of racial extortionists like Al Sharpton, who took a movement in support of American pluralism and turned it into a movement governed by a lynch mob mentality in which white Americans are regarded as guilty before the fact and African Americans are regarded as innocent even when the facts prove them guilty, even when their crimes are committed against other African Americans. The author of Progressive Racism, David Horowitz, is a witness to these events and betrayals. Horowitz was a participant in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and in 2001 led a national campaign against a proposal for "slavery reparations" that would have required Hispanic, Asian and other Americans who had no role in slavery to pay reparations to African Americans who were never slaves. Progressive Racism examines how the term "racism" has been drained of its original meaning and is now used as a weapon to bludgeon opponents into silence. It describes how the so-called civil rights movement has become an oppressor of African Americans by supporting a failed school system that blights the lives of millions of African American children and a welfare system that has destroyed the black family and created a "underclass" dependent on government charity. It is an indictment of the hypocrisy that today governs discourse on race issues, so that a lynch mob in Ferguson, Missouri seeking to hang a police officer because he was white can be described as a civil rights protest and be supported by the first African American president of the United States.

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Cronyism is a serious problem in the United States, but unfortunately it is still not very well understood. In this new essay, Jay Cost explains what it is, and why we should be so worried about it. By mingling private and public interests, cronyism costs us hundreds of billions of dollars per year and threatens to transform our republic into an oligarchy, where the rich dominate the middle class. Worse, modern cronyism has become embedded into the laws themselves, so politicians in Washington assume that such corruption is just the way things should be. To confront the dangers of cronyism, reformers need to think outside the box, paying special attention to how the political process functions.

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The Federal Reserve is one of the most disliked entities in the United States at present, right alongside the IRS. Americans despise the Fed, but they're also generally a bit confused as to why they distrust our central bank. Their animus is reasonable, though, because the Fed's most famous function--targeting the Fed funds rate--is totally backwards. John Tamny explains this backwardness in terms of a Taylor Swift concert followed by a ride home with Uber. In modern times, he points out, the notion of credit has been perverted, so that most people believe it's money and that the supply of it can therefore be increased. This false notion has aggrandized the Fed with power that it can't possibly use wisely. The contrast between the grinding poverty of Baltimore and the abundance of Silicon Valley helps illustrate the problem, along with stories about Donald Trump, Robert Downey Jr., Jim Harbaugh (the Michigan football coach), and robots. Who Needs the Fed? makes a sober case against the Federal Reserve by explaining what credit really is, and why the Fed's existence is inimical to its creation. Readers will come away entertained, much more knowledgeable, and prepared to argue that the Fed is merely superfluous on its best days but perilous on its worst.

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Why Conservatives Should Stop Opposing the Common Core (Common Core: Yea) by Sol Stern In the past few decades -- as progressives gained influence in universities and schools of education -- the idea of a coherent, content-rich curriculum has been erased from America's classrooms. Now, for all its faults, the Common Core State Standards represent the best opportunity we have to restore that structure in our schools. In this Broadside, Sol Stern shows how both sides of the education spectrum have misrepresented the Common Core. The left regards the standards as a threat to their ideological hegemony, while conservative pundits lack a true understanding of what they actually provide. Americans should see the Common Core as an opening to restore academic content to the nation's schools and reverse the influence of educational progressivism in our classrooms. Why the Common Core Is a Bad Idea (Common Core: Nay) by Peter W. Wood The latest effort to fix America's schools has backfired. In 2007, an elite group of would-be reformers devised a brilliant political strategy to transform education without ever facing public scrutiny. Their bold strategy, which became the Common Core State Standards, was astonishingly successful -- for a while. Then the American public took notice. In this Broadside, Peter W. Wood explains how the Common Core actually lowers standards while pretending to raise them and chokes off local control of our schools in favor of domination by the federal government and private groups. Bankrolled by the Gates Foundation, favored by political elites, and supported by true believers on both sides of the political spectrum, the Common Core once appeared unstoppable. But it can be stopped, and this book shows us how.

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Saving Congress from Itself proposes a single reform: eliminate all federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments. This action would reduce federal spending by over $600 billion a year and have a profound effect on how we govern ourselves. The proliferation of federal grants-in-aid programs is of recent vintage: only about 100 such grants existed before Lyndon Johnson took office, and now they number more than 1,100. Eliminating grants to the states will result in enormous savings in federal and state administrative costs; free states to set their own priorities; and improve the design and implementation of programs now subsidized by Washington by eliminating federal regulations that attend the grants. In short, it will free states and their subdivisions to resume full responsibility for all activities that fall within their competence, such as education, welfare, and highway construction and maintenance. And because members of Congress spend major portions of their time creating grants and allocating funds assigned to them (think earmarks), eliminating grants will enable Congress to devote its time to responsibilities that are uniquely national in character.

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Medicaid, America's government-run health insurance program for the poor, should be a lifeline that provides needed health care to Americans with no other options. Surprisingly, however, it doesn't. The medical literature reveals a $450 billion-a-year scandal: that people on Medicaid have far worse health outcomes than those with private insurance, and no better outcomes than those with no insurance at all. Why is this so? In How Medicaid Fails the Poor, Avik Roy explains how Medicaid's clumsy design and perverse incentives make it hard for people on Medicaid to get the medical care they need. Medicaid doesn't reimburse doctors or hospitals for the cost of caring for Medicaid enrollees, forcing many doctors to opt out of the program. The Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, doubles down on this broken system. Roy shows us that there are better ways, using private insurance, to provide needed care to our poorest citizens.

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Economist Herb Stein famously said that something that can't go on forever, won't. For decades now, America has been investing ever-growing fortunes into its K-12 education system in exchange for steadily worse results. Public schools haven't changed much from the late 19th century industrial model and as a result young Americans are left increasingly unprepared for a competitive global economy. At the same time, Americans are spending more than they can afford on higher education, driven by the kind of cheap credit that fueled the housing bubble. With college graduates unable to secure employment or pay off student loans, the real-world value of a traditional college education is in question. In The New School, Glenn Harlan Reynolds explains how parents, students and educators can, and must, reclaim and remake American education. Already, Reynolds explains, many Americans are abandoning traditional education for new models. Many are going to charter schools or private schools, but others are going another step beyond and making the leap to online education--over 1.8 million K-12 students already. The New School does not prescribe a one-size-fits-all solution for education. Americans require a diverse system of innovative approaches--each suited to a family's needs and spending potential. But with the profusion of online education, school choice, and even a return to alternatives like apprenticeships and on the job training, Americans hold the power to lower costs and improve outcomes from the ground up.

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The Smart Society offers a detailed blueprint for how the United States can recast its human capital policies to make all Americans--not just a privileged elite--smarter and more successful than ever before, at the same time stemming the size and cost of the nation's "safety net." The spectacular, centuries-long success of the United States is based on its having determined, early on, to be a smart country, single-mindedly developing institutions and practices that enabled its native born citizens to maximize their economic and social potential, and welcoming opportunity-seeking foreigners to join them. Over the last four decades, however, the vaunted United States human capital machine has been breaking down, dimming the economic and social prospects of millions of Americans. If The Smart Society blueprint is followed, these trends can be reversed and the nation and its people can quickly regain their preeminence in the hyper-competitive and globalized world of the 21st century. This is a most topical issue today because the country's current heated political disagreements are not just about the proper size of government, but about how the United States can reverse its apparent decline and restore its historic economic and social vigor--in other words, regain its place as the world's "smartest" nation.

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Economist Herb Stein famously said that something that can't go on forever, won't. For decades now, America has been putting ever-growing amounts of money into its K-12 education system, while getting steadily poorer results. Now parents are losing faith in public schools, new alternatives are appearing, and change is on the way. The K-12 Implosion provides a succinct description of what's wrong, and where the solutions are likely to appear, along with advice for parents, educators, and taxpayers.

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