Search results for ""Encounter Books,USA""

W.H. Auden famously wrote: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Journalism is a different matter. In a brilliant study that is, in part, a memoir of his 40 years as an essayist and critic at TIME magazine, Lance Morrow returns to the Age of Typewriters and to the 20th century’s extraordinary cast of characters—statesmen and dictators, saints and heroes, liars and monsters, and the reporters, editors, and publishers who interpreted their deeds. He shows how journalism has touched the history of the last 100 years, has shaped it, distorted it, and often proved decisive in its outcomes.Lord Beaverbrook called journalism “the black art.” Morrow considers the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent who published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series praising Stalin just at the moment when Stalin imposed mass starvation upon the people of Ukraine and the North Caucasus in order to enforce the collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Millions died.John Hersey’s Hiroshima, on the other hand, has been all but sanctified—called the 20th century’s greatest piece of journalism. Was it? Morrow examines the complex moral politics of Hersey’s reporting, which the New Yorker first published in 1946.The Noise of Typewriters is, among other things, an intensely personal study of an age that has all but vanished. Morrow is the son of two journalists who got their start covering Roosevelt and Truman. When Morrow and Carl Bernstein were young, they worked together as dictation typists at the Washington Star (a newspaper now extinct). Bernstein had dedicated Chasing History, his memoir of those days, to Morrow. It was Morrow’s friend and editor Walter Isaacson—biographer of Leonardo Da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs—who taught Morrow how to use a computer when the machines were first introduced at TIME.Here are striking profiles of Henry Luce, TIME’s founder, and of Dorothy Thompson, Claud Cockburn, Edgar Snow, Joseph and Stewart Alsop, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Otto Friedrich, Michael Herr, and other notable figures in a golden age of print journalism that ended with the coming of television, computers, and social media. The Noise of Typewriters is the vivid portrait of an era.

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This pamphlet exposes how the Democratic Party has changed beyond recognition. Once the party of anti-communism and tax-cutting under President Kennedy, it is now dominated by a surging socialist movement and led by a presidential candidate who vows to “transform” America. On a near-daily basis, the Democrats are issuing radical proposals to socialize medicine, industry, and higher education. So how can the Democrats win elections when their agenda is so far to the left of the American people? That’s easy—it’s because the means of public debate are being manipulated. In this explosive Encounter Broadside, Congressman Devin Nunes exposes the nexus between the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and the social media corporations. These three entities cooperate to blast out the Democrats’ message and downplay their extremism while suppressing and censoring conservative points of view. Tens of millions of Americans are only seeing one side of the debate. The information they get from newspapers and social media is not “news”—it’s contrived content designed to help one political party and punish its opponents. In the run-up to the most consequential election of our lifetime, read this book to learn how your information is being skewed and regulated to force America onto the path to socialism. About Encounter Broadsides: In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy as we know it. Encounter Broadsides seek to revive this medium to make the case for ordered liberty and democratic capitalism in our time. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.

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This Teachers’ Guide to Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story will be an invaluable aid to classroom teachers who use Land of Hope as a textbook for courses in United States history. McClay has coauthored the Guide with John McBride, a master teacher with over thirty years of secondary and collegiate teaching experience. The result is an exceptionally rich and useful resource for the enhancement of the classroom experience. Each chapter of Land of Hope has a five-part treatment: a short summation of the chapter’s contents, a lengthy set of questions and answers about the text of the chapter, materials that can be deployed in testing or used to sharpen classroom discussion; a set of short objective tests, suitable for quizzes and exams; a primary-source document for class study and analysis; and questions and answers to accompany the document. In addition, there are special units to assist teachers in the giving special coverage to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Origins of the Two-Party System. Like Land of Hope itself, these materials are designed to help students come away from the study of the American past with a coherent sense of the larger story, and a sense of history as a profoundly reflective activity, one that goes to the depth of our humanity.

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Here is a tasty paradox: How did the Leftist legions regroup after history delivered its fatal blow to the Soviet system? Simple, argues Jean-Francois Revel: the Left retreated to the impregnable fortress of the Utopian ideal. After all, socialism incarnate was always vulnerable to criticism. Utopia, on the other hand, lies by definition beyond reproach. With the demise of the Soviet system, there is no longer a vast and flailing embodiment of their vision, and Utopia’s haughty champions can again rage boundlessly. In Last Exit to Utopia, the latest English language translation of one of Europe’s most controversial intellectuals, Jean-Francois Revel takes aim at socialist apologists who have attempted to erase or invert the manifest failures of socialist ideology. As the tide of Big Government rises in America, Revel’s forewarnings here are as prescient as they are frightening.

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The Western press these days is full of stories on China's arrival as a superpower, some even warning that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident in China's economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Crowning China's new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Olympic Games. But as Guy Sorman reveals in Empire of Lies China's success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, those fortunate enough to be working in an expanding global market, enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining one billion, however, are among the poorest, most exploited people in the world. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. In truth, China's economic "miracle" is rotting from within. In this extraordinary book, Sorman explains how the West has conferred greater legitimacy on China than do the Chinese themselves. He has visited the country regularly for forty years and spent most of the past three years exploring her teeming cities and remotest corners. Empire of Lies is the culmination of these travels and perhaps the only book on China that lets the Chinese people speak for themselves.

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Roger Simon is among the many refugees fleeing blue state neoliberalism, and he's written the best account of our generation's greatest migration.-Tucker Carlson,fired Fox News hostAs a citizen of Tennessee, I can attest to the fact that there is a great migration happening from blue to red states. When people have had enough tyranny, they search for freedom elsewhere. This book captures a pivotal moment in time for our nation.-John Rich, country music superstar and owner of Redneck Riviera BrandRoger's analysis inAmerican Refugeesprovides great evidence that America isn't in some inevitable national decline, we're just young. We're going through our own version of adolescence as a nation.-Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Presidential CandidateA net exodus of Americans from blue to red states has been in progress for several years now. This is largely a southbound movement, and perhaps some migrants are running from the cold up in New England, as the song goes. But mostly they are leaving s

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The great expedition to Sicily described in the sixth and seventh books of Thucydides’ history can be depicted in a variety of ways. By some, it has been thoughtfully treated as an example of overreaching on the part of the Athenians. By others, it has been singled out as a sterling example of patriotism, courage, and grit on the part of the Syracusans. Never until now, however, has anyone examined this conflict from a Spartan perspective – despite the fact that Lacedaemon was the war’s principal beneficiary and that her intervention with the dispatch of a single Spartiate turned the tide and decided the outcome. In Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War, Paul Rahe first outlines the struggle’s origins and traces its progress early on, then examines the reasons for Sparta’s intervention, analyzes the consequences, and retells the story of Athens’ ignominious defeat. Rarely in human history has a political community gained so much at so little cost through the efforts of a single man.

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When COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China under mysterious circumstances, the Communist Party of China covered up its existence for as long as possible. It is now apparent that there is more to COVID than what the authorities wish for us to know. Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life details the decades-long pursuit by the Chinese Communists to dominate the biotechnology industry—to control the very building blocks of life on Earth—to further their political control at home and their supremacy abroad. More appalling than the egregious cover-up that China’s rulers engaged in with COVID-19 is the fact that Western scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs have contributed to China’s rapid (and dangerous) growth in the biotech industry—so much so that China, not the United States, may become the seat of the biotechnology industry. The Chinese leadership believes that biotechnology is a critical industry for the Communist Party to achieve its goal of becoming the world’s dominant superpower by 2049. In China’s biotech sector, truly macabre practices are being developed, from ambitious cloning programs to the creation of potential pathogens that China’s military plans to use in “specific genetic attacks” against Beijing’s growing list of political enemies.To stop the threat, author Brandon J. Weichert proposes the world’s nations create a comprehensive set of treaties for regulating biotechnology research and development. Further, Weichert calls for Washington to slow the transfer of advanced biotechnology knowledge and funding from the United States to China using means like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Unless an all-of-government (and society) approach is taken to curbing irresponsible biotech development in China, then another—deadlier—COVID-19-like pandemic could be at hand.

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Curiosity led Edward Epstein to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, such as the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome, and the diamond cartel in South Africa. Seeking more information, he often found himself a fly on the wall at the highest reaches of the establishment, observing how presidents, tycoons, bankers, and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. This memoir recounts his life as a pursuer of lost truths. Some accuse Epstein of being a conspiracist, but that is incorrect. He is a puzzle solver. Instead of accepting the received wisdom, he searches for the missing pieces of the picture, such as the autopsy photographs of President John F. Kennedy that were kept from the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission. Finding suppressed or overlooked evidence may result in overturning an established narrative, as happened with the publication of Inquest, Epstein’s book about the official probe into the JFK assassination. But that is very different from looking for a conspiracy. Sometimes, Epstein’s work has in fact uncovered a deep conspiracy, as with the world diamond cartel. Other times, it has discredited belief in a conspiracy, as when he delved into the murders of numerous Black Panthers. After his findings were published in the New Yorker, newspapers including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times issued editorial apologies for their own reporting on the murders, which had suggested that an FBI conspiracy was behind them.Epstein’s primary interest has never been to advance an agenda, but rather to spot gaps in the conventional narrative and fill them in. Assume Nothing is the story of a lifelong quest for missing puzzle pieces, and also a story of self-actualization.

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VOLUME TWO: THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA From 1877 to 2020 The Founders of the American nation would have had trouble recognizing the America that emerged after the Civil War. By century’s end we had rapidly evolved into the world’s greatest industrial power. It was a nation of large new cities populated by immigrants from all over the world. And it was a nation that was taking an increasingly active role on the world stage, even to the point of acquiring an empire of its own. Many Americans began to wonder whether this modern nation had outgrown its original Constitution. That document had been written back in the eighteenth century, after all, and one of its main goals was limiting the size and scope of government. But did that goal make sense in the dynamic new America of the twentieth century? That became a central question. The Progressive movement and its successors believed it was time to replace the Constitution with laws permitting a larger and more powerful government. Others firmly rejected such changes and insisted on the permanent validity of the Constitution’s ideal of limited government. In addition, with the two great world wars of the twentieth century, and the Cold War that came after them, America found itself thrust into a position of overwhelming world leadership—something else that the Founders never imagined or wanted. Such leadership required the development of a large and permanent military establishment whose very existence ran up against the nation’s founding traditions. With the end of the Cold War, America faced a decision. Should it shed the world responsibilities it had taken on during the twentieth century? Or should it treat those responsibilities as a permanent obligation? That debate, which has deep roots in American history, continues to this day.

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Did the Covid virus jump naturally from an animal species to humans, or did it escape from a laboratory experiment? In this essay, science writer Nicholas Wade explores the two scenarios and argues that, on present evidence, lab escape is the more likely explanation. His inference is based on specific research being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Institute’s lack of adequate safety precautions, together with the continuing absence of any direct evidence to support natural emergence.The essay discusses the failure of the mainstream media to penetrate the self-interested assurance of virologists that lab escape was a dismissible conspiracy theory. It also notes how the politicization of discussion impeded consideration of the scientific facts.

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John Quincy Adams is widely recognized as America’s most distinguished diplomat, taking into account the length and breadth of his public service and his influence on American foreign policy. In the course of this remarkable journey, John Quincy documented his ideas and actions through his writings, speeches, letters, diary entries, and state papers. To aid those interested specifically in learning more about the man and his views on foreign policy, the editors have compiled a collection of the most important and often-cited works, such as his famous July 4, 1821 Oration: “she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”The selections in this volume provide insights into Adams's diplomatic practices and the critical issues that marked the young American nation. To give the readers context, the editors have provided introductions for both particular periods in John Quincy's life as well as individual documents. Wherever possible, the editors have included the full text but, given the immensity of the available material and John Quincy Adams’s style of writing, they have used discretion to abridge certain documents.

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In his newest book, Daniel J. Mahoney offers refreshing historical antidotes to the displays of despotism in today's political arena."A brilliantly written and researched tribute to the pantheon of classically trained and thinking men of action." —Victor Davis HansonIn The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis: Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar’s encroaching autocracy; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny in revolutionary France; Tocqueville defending liberty and human dignity against blind reaction, democratic impatience, and revolutionary fanaticism; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to chattel slavery; Churchill defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; and Havel fighting Communism before 1989 and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace.Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.

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“Matthew Hennessey’s Visible Hand is a wise reminder that free markets are essential to human flourishing.” —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal Columnist“Econ 101 should always be this much fun.” —Larry Kudlow, former director of the National Economic CouncilTo most people, the word "economics" sounds like homework. In Visible Hand, Wall Street Journal op-ed editor Matthew Hennessey brings basic economic principles vividly to life in plain English, without resort to numbers, graphs, or jargon. This isn't Fed policy or the stock market. This is the essential stuff: supply and demand, incentives and tradeoffs, scarcity and innovation, work and leisure. A teenager should be able to discuss these things intelligently. Sadly, too few of us can explain them even in adulthood. Visible Hand equips readers with the essential vocabulary necessary to understand and explain how we make the choices we do. In Hennessey's hands, economics is far from the dismal science. It's the sparkling art of decision making. No homework necessary.

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The Kennedys may well be the most photographed, written about, talked about, admired, hated, and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing both family members and hundreds of people close to the Kennedys.An immediate classic, The Kennedys combines intimate knowledge with a perspective free of obligations to family loyalties and myths, bringing the story of four generations of “America’s family” fully into view. Collier and Horowitz capture the strain of ambition; the dynastic ebb and flow; the invention of a mythic identity; the corrosive underside of the dream of Camelot—developed over four generations—that led one young Kennedy to say, “We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them.”The Kennedys: An American Drama is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys’ rise and fall. The authors have added new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., and the other family tragedies of the last few years, on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life.In addition to The Kennedys, Peter Collier and David Horowitz are the authors of dynastic biographies of the Fords, Roosevelts, Rockefellers, and Fondas.

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This book combines a critique of more than a century of housing reform policies, including public and other subsidized housing as well as exclusionary zoning, with the idea that simple low-cost housing—a poor side of town—helps those of modest means build financial assets and join in the local democratic process. It is more of a historical narrative than a straight policy book, however—telling stories of Jacob Riis, zoning reformer Lawrence Veiller, anti-reformer Jane Jacobs, housing developer William Levitt, and African American small homes advocate Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood, as well as first-person accounts of onetime residents of neighborhoods such as Detroit’s Black Bottom who lost their homes and businesses to housing reform and urban renewal. This is a book with important policy implications—built on powerful, personal stories.

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This is a story of hope, but also of peril. It began when our nation’s polarized political class started conscripting everyday citizens into its culture war. From their commanding heights in political parties, media, academia, and government, these partisans have attacked one another for years, but increasingly they’ve convinced everyday Americans to join the fray. Why should we feel such animosity toward our fellow citizens, our neighbors, even our own kin? Because we’ve fallen for the false narrative, eagerly promoted by pundits on the Left and the Right, that citizens who happen to vote Democrat or Republican are enthusiastic supporters of Team Blue or Team Red. Aside from a minority of party activists and partisans, however, most voters are simply trying to choose the lesser of two evils. The real threat to our union isn’t Red vs. Blue America, it’s the quiet collusion within our nation’s political class to take away that most American of freedoms: our right to self-governance. Even as partisans work overtime to divide Americans against one another, they’ve erected a system under which we ordinary citizens don’t have a voice in the decisions that affect our lives. From foreign wars to how local libraries are run, authority no longer resides with We the People, but amongst unaccountable officials. The political class has stolen our birthright and set us at one another’s throats. This is the story of how that happened and what we can do about it. America stands at a precipice, but there’s still time to reclaim authority over our lives and communities.

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The America of the modern administrative state is not the America of the original Constitution. This transformation comes not only from the ordinary course of historical change and development, but also from a radical, new philosophy of government that was imported into the American political tradition by the Progressives of the late nineteenth century. The new thinking about the principles of government—and open hostility to the American Constitution—led to a host of concrete changes in American political institutions. Our government today reflects these original Progressive innovations, even if they are often unrecognized as such because they have become ingrained in American political culture. This book shows the nature of these changes, both in principles and in the nuts and bolts of governing. It also shows how progressivism was often at the root of critical developments subsequent to the Progressive Era in more recent American political history — how it was different than the New Deal, the liberalism of the 1960s, and today’s liberalism, but also how these subsequent developments could not have transpired without the ground laid by the original Progressives.

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America is suffering from two public health crises. One is caused by a virus. The other, a brutal economic shutdown, is something we have brought on ourselves. Both the virus and the shutdown are deadly. But many more Americans will likely die from getting laid off than from the virus.The shutdown wasn’t caused by the virus. It was a frantic response to America’s unpreparedness. For more than two decades, a dozen official reports sounded the alarm. The career pols and federal bureaucrats did nothing. Message to Washington DC: No more commissions and televised hearings. It’s time to act.In this incendiary Encounter Broadside, Betsy McCaughey shows how to battle the next pandemic without an economic shutdown, including technologies to make workplaces healthier, protections for hospital workers, and severing dependence on China for medical supplies. Despite the suffering, there's reason for optimism. America will be ready for the next pandemic.

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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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In the years following the Civil War, pioneers in the women’s rights movement, women’s medical education, and public-private charitable partnerships joined forces to reduce the incidence of abortion in America. As alumni of the abolitionist movement, they analyzed abortion in ways that resembled their earlier critiques of slavery. Abortion, too, was a structural problem. A self-evidently evil act, it was sustained by the quack doctors and unscrupulous press that it enriched. These advocates believed that women seeking abortions had usually been deprived of their ability to act freely, rationally, and well in the world, almost always by external forces. Thus, they had sympathy for their suffering sisters and pity for their injuries—physical and moral. Early women’s rights advocates worked to raise vulnerable women to their feet, providing them with material and moral resources for “self-extrication” from the depths into which they had sunk. The authors of this book have approached their subject critically, examining not just the early women’s rights advocates’ publicly spoken words, but the networks and institutions that they built. This previously untold story illuminates the early history of women’s rights and abortion in America.

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Commies is a brilliant memoir of growing up in the culture of radicalism. But it also about the hard decisions faced by those professing a radical faith. For Radosh himself, the crisis came when he concluded in his authoritative book on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that the couple (in whose behalf he had demonstrated as a boy) had indeed been guilty of spying. Attacked as a traitor, Radosh began to question his political commitments. His disillusionment climaxed in the 1980s when he traveled through Central America as a journalist and historian and ran into his old comrades there still searching for the revolution.

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In the United States you can elect any president you want, but a small group of people you’ve never heard of still run everything — year after year, administration after administration. That’s not democracy. It’s oligarchy, and Mark Moyar explains exactly how it works. —Tucker CarlsonThis book tells a remarkable true story of bureaucratic assassination during the Trump presidency, revealing in vivid detail how career federal employees thwarted President Trump’s efforts to drain the swamp.Mark Moyar, a senior political appointee at the US Agency for International Development, discovered evidence of corruption involving five career bureaucrats and reported it to agency officials in 2018. Senior bureaucrats orchestrated a sophisticated retaliatory p

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"Paul Tice delivers a body-blow to the predations of the ESG-industrial-complex."—Mark P. Mills, Senior Fellow, Manhattan InstituteOver the past few years, so-called “sustainable investing”—a new practice based on the theory that environmental, social, and governance (or “ESG”) factors should drive corporate policy and investment decisions—has swept across Wall Street. Spurred on by the United Nations, national governments, and financial regulators, and cheered on by academics, environmental activists, and the media, the ESG orthodoxy has received little public resistance as it has integrated itself into almost every corner of the financial sector. By 2030, the iron curtain of sustainability will have fully cast its shadow across Wall Street.The Race to Zero provides a de

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Some Problems with Autobiography, Brian Brodeur’s fourth collection, grapples with the porous and fragmentary nature of midwestern American identity in poems that range across prosodic forms and hybrid genres. By turns self-mocking, meditative, and tragi-comic, this book explores the perils of digital technologies, ecological uncertainties, and the inadequacy of language to convey our collective distress, asking how much pleasure and hardship the human heart can bear. Brodeur’s narrative poems feature a dramatis personae rare in contemporary poetry, including a Syrian refugee enrolled in a writing workshop, the wife of an accused serial killer shopping defense lawyers, a horny psychoanalyst confessing a dream, and a carpenter working for the Department of Education during New York City’s first lockdown. From dramatic-monologue sonnets and narrative sestinas to discursive lyrics cast in Rubáiyát stanzas and Alcaic strophes, Some Problems with Autobiography brings ancient modes into startlingly contemporary contexts.

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During the 1980s and 1990s, European economies went through a period of slowing economic growth and high unemployment, what some economists described as “secular decline.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States enjoyed a robust recovery during those years by reducing taxes, eliminating regulations on business, and tightening monetary policy. Now, after two decades of subpar growth, the question is whether or not the American economy has entered into its own era of secular decline.This Broadside examines this troubling development, recognizing that there are no easy solutions to the problem. Lacking workable solutions, Americans will have to adjust to a future of slow economic growth, with all that implies for inter-generational progress, American strength abroad and political conflict at home.

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America has always been committed to the idea that citizens can work together to build a common world. Today, three afflictions keep us from pursuing that noble ideal. The first and most obvious affliction is identity politics, which seeks to transform America by turning politics into a religious venue of sacrificial offering. For now, the sacrificial scapegoat is the white, heterosexual, man. After he is humiliated and purged, who will be the object of cathartic rage? White women? Black men? Identity politics is the anti-egalitarian spiritual eugenics of our age. It demands that pure and innocent groups ascend, and the stained transgressor groups be purged. The second affliction is that citizens oscillate back and forth, in bipolar fashion, at one moment feeling invincible on their social media platforms and, the next, feeling impotent to face the everyday problems of life without the guidance of experts and global managers. Third, Americans are afflicted by a disease that cannot quite be named, characterized by an addictive hope that they can find cheap shortcuts that bypass the difficult labors of everyday life. Instead of real friendship, we seek social media “friends.”Instead of meals at home, we order “fast food.” Instead of real shopping, we “shop” online. Instead of counting on our families and neighbors to address our problems, we look to the state to take care of us. In its many forms, this disease promises release from our labors, yet impoverishes us all. American Awakening chronicles all of these problems, yet gives us hope for the future.

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