Search results for ""encounter books,usa""

Donald Trump, who rocketed to the top of the polls in the early GOP primary race, is an unlikely Republican front-runner: a longtime supporter of Democratic politicians with a history of taking views opposed to those of mainstream conservatives. A household name for his reality-television show and his tawdry tabloid history, he has connected with an underappreciated strain of right-wing populists by focusing his fire on a single issue: immigration. In this Broadside, Kevin D. Williamson takes a hard look at the Trump phenomenon and the failures of the national Republican leadership -- and defects in our national character -- that gave it life. Trump may or may not be in the race for the long haul, but in either case, Trumpism will remain a force.

Read more less

The Internet is a platform of ceaseless innovation that has transformed our lives in a remarkably short time. And the United States has led that revolution: of the 15 largest websites in the world, 10 are American. But all that is now under threat. In February 2015, the Federal Communications Commission imposed extensive regulatory controls on this vibrant digital universe in an effort to mandate "network neutrality." In this Broadside, Brian C. Anderson explains how the FCC's power grab for "neutrality" could be devastating for the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy. Network neutrality is at odds with everything that made today's Internet the market cornucopia that it is, and we must protect it from the encroach--ments of Washington in order to foster its further growth.

Read more less

The promise of America is that, with ambition and hard work, anyone can rise to the top. But now the promise has been broken, and we've become an aristocracy where rich parents raise rich kids and poor parents raise poor kids. We've been told that the changes are structural, that there's nothing we can do about this. But that doesn't explain why other First World countries are beating us hands down on the issue of mobility. What's different about America is our politics. An ostensibly progressive New Class of comfortably rich professionals, media leaders, and academics has shaped the contours of American politics and given us a country of fixed economic classes. It is supported by the poorest of Americans, who have little chance to rise, an alliance of both ends against the middle that recalls the Red Tories of parliamentary countries. Because they support an aristocracy, the members of the New Class are Tories, and because of their feigned concern for the poor, they are Red Tories. The Way Back explains the revolution in American politics, where political insurgents have challenged the complacent establishment of both parties, and shows how we can restore the promise of economic mobility and equality by pursuing socialist ends through capitalist means.

Read more less

The world has seldom been as dangerous as it is now. Rogue regimes--governments and groups that eschew diplomatic normality, sponsor terrorism, and proliferate nuclear weapons--threaten the United States around the globe. Because sanctions and military action are so costly, the American strategy of first resort is dialogue, on the theory that "it never hurts to talk to enemies." Seldom is conventional wisdom so wrong. Engagement with rogue regimes is not cost-free, as Michael Rubin demonstrates by tracing the history of American diplomacy with North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, the Taliban's Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Further challenges to traditional diplomacy have come from terrorist groups, such as the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, or Hamas and Hezbollah in the last two decades. The argument in favor of negotiation with terrorists is suffused with moral equivalence, the idea that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Rarely does the actual record of talking to terrorists come under serious examination. While soldiers spend weeks developing lessons learned after every exercise, diplomats generally do not reflect on why their strategy toward rogues has failed, or consider whether their basic assumptions have been faulty. Rubin's analysis finds that rogue regimes all have one thing in common: they pretend to be aggrieved in order to put Western diplomats on the defensive. Whether in Pyongyang, Tehran, or Islamabad, rogue leaders understand that the West rewards bluster with incentives and that the U.S. State Department too often values process more than results.

Read more less

Government at every level is too big, too powerful, and too intrusive. But don't blame just legislators and members of the executive branch for constantly overstepping their constitutional bounds. As Clark Neily argues in The Terms of Engagement, judges have more than their fair share of the blame. While liberals seek court rulings creating positive rights to things like free health care and conservatives call for judicial "restraint," the end result is same: greater government power and diminished individual rights. With compelling real-world examples and penetrating legal analysis, Neily's book shows how judicial abdication brought us to this point and calls for "judicial engagement" to restore courts as the critical check on the other branches of government envisioned by the Framers. Neily documents how courts have largely abandoned that vital role, and he offers a persuasive solution for the epidemic of judicial abdication: principled judicial engagement whereby judges actually judge in all constitutional cases, rather than reflexively taking the government's side as they so often do now. Anyone concerned about the size of government, the sanctity of the Constitution, and the rule of law will find a refreshingly new perspective in this book written for non-lawyers and lawyers alike.

Read more less

In June 1973, Judge Robert Bork was plucked from a quiet life of academia at Yale University and planted in the tumultuous soil of constitutional crisis by a Nixon administration barreling toward collapse. From the ousting of Vice President Spiro Agnew to the discharge of the Watergate special prosecutor, an event known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Saving Justice offers a firsthand, insider account of the whirlwind of events that engulfed the administration during the last half of 1973 and the first few months of 1974. This important volume provides a revelatory look into the inner workings of the Justice Department during some of the most consequential months of the Nixon administration.

Read more less

Fidel Castro jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin during the Great Terror. He murdered more Cubans in his first three years in power than Hitler murdered Germans during his first six. Alone among world leaders, Castro came to within inches of igniting a global nuclear holocaust. But you would never guess any of that from reading the mainstream American media. Instead we hear fawning accounts of Castro liberating Cuba from the clutches of U.S. robber-barons and bestowing world-class healthcare and education on his downtrodden citizens. "Propaganda is vital--the heart of our struggle," Castro wrote in 1955. Today, the concept is as valid to the Cuban regime as ever. History records few propaganda campaigns as phenomenally successful or enduring as Castro and Che's. The Longest Romance exposes the full scope of this deception; it documents the complicity of major U.S. media players in spreading Castro's propaganda and in coloring the world's view of his totalitarian regime. Castro's cachet as a celebrity icon of anti-Americanism has always overshadowed his record as a warmonger, racist, sexist, Stalinist, and godfather of modern terrorism. The Longest Romance uncovers this shameful history and names its major accomplices.

Read more less

Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded? For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that's busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It's all bunk. The "population bomb" never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we've been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world's population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, it's already started. Japan, for instance, will be half its current size by the end of the century. In Italy, there are already more deaths than births every year. China's One-Child Policy has left that country without enough women to marry its men, not enough young people to support the country's elderly, and an impending population contraction that has the ruling class terrified. And all of this is coming to America, too. In fact, it's already here. Middle-class Americans have their own, informal one-child policy these days. And an alarming number of upscale professionals don't even go that far--they have dogs, not kids. In fact, if it weren't for the wave of immigration we experienced over the last thirty years, the United States would be on the verge of shrinking, too. What happened? Everything about modern life--from Bugaboo strollers to insane college tuition to government regulations--has pushed Americans in a single direction, making it harder to have children. And making the people who do still want to have children feel like second-class citizens. What to Expect When No One's Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world. Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies.

Read more less

The ideas and policies that are percolating down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill--increased government intervention, calls to "spread the wealth around," onerous regulations, and bailouts for all--are not new. We've been down this road before. We know where it leads. It is that forlorn byway that Friedrich von Hayek called the Road to Serfdom. The good news is we don't have to go down that road again. Resurrecting 18th-century style pamphleteering, Encounter Broadsides provide the intellectual ammunition for the battle over America's future. From the folly of Obamacare, to the politicization of the Justice Department, or disastrous efforts to nationalize our education system, each Encounter Broadside assaults a new tentacle of the rising statism. Now, for the first time, The New Leviathan collects these salvos in one essential handbook. The New Leviathan is edited by Roger Kimball with contributions from John R. Bolton, Daniel DiSalvo, Richard A. Epstein, Peter Ferrara, John Fund, Victor Davis Hanson, Andrew C. McCarthy, Betsy McCaughey, Stephen Moore, Michael B. Mukasey, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Rich Trzupek, and Kevin D. Williamson. Together, they make the definitive case for liberty and democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment.

Read more less

In the Age of Obama, the ugly charge of racism is more prevalent than ever. Why? Because telling the truth about racial profiling, crime, the social fallout of single parent homes, and the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice would mean facing up to the soul-destroying pathologies of urban black culture. Instead, black leaders and their guilty white allies focus tirelessly on historic oppression and the supposed need for more government aid, and demonize those who challenge their shopworn views as--what else?--racist. In No Matter What ...They'll Call This Book Racist, Harry Stein attacks the rigid prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about race, not to offend or shock (though they certainly will) but to provoke the serious thinking that liberal enforcers have until now rendered impossible. Stein examines the ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sown division, corruption, and resentment in this country. He pays special attention to the stifling falsehood that it is racism that continues to mire millions of underclass blacks in physical and spiritual poverty. by far the greater problem, says Stein, is the culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape. For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half century, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. All of us--and especially black people--for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.

Read more less

Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more--much more--to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding question: What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government's outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed to a nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist. Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals' aphasia about the welfare state's ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism's lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state's limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another's rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations.

Read more less

Since 1965 the number of priests in the United States has fallen by some 30,000. But over that same time period, more than 30,000 laypeople have come into the employ of parishes and other Church institutions. Laypeople have stepped up to serve in a variety of new ministries, and they are relieving their pastors of many administrative burdens, enabling them to focus on their proper priestly duties. Lay teachers now outnumber nuns, brothers, and priests in Catholic schools by at least 19 to 1. In the history of the Church, laypeople have never been asked to do so much. William E. Simon, Jr. and Michael Novak call attention to this great shift in Living the Call. The first part of the book tells the personal stories of nine faithful laypeople now serving the Church in new and diverse ways. Simon and Novak's insight is that more and more who work in the Church feel the need to shape their lives in a new way, matched to their different needs and adjusted to the new base of knowledge about the world with which they begin. In response to this need, the second part of Living the Call offers practical examples and reflections on a number of themes, including entering into the presence of God and learning different forms of prayer, reading that refreshes the mind and deepens the soul, and the graces of the sacraments and how being a spouse contributes to holiness.

Read more less

Starting on Jan. 1, 2011, President Obama's economic recovery policy will begin the implementation of comprehensive, across-the-board tax rate increases for every major federal tax, along with some completely new taxes. Yet Obama and Congressional Democrats seek even more tax increases. In this insightful Broadside, Peter Ferrara shows that while President Reagan's tax policies created a 25-year economic boom, the Obama tax tsunami will sink the economy further if it is not stopped. It will produce a double-dip recession in 2011 , if not a full economic crash. President Obama's tax policies are effectively tax piracy, and they are more likely to lose revenue and leave bigger federal deficits and debt for the country.

Read more less

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States went to war. With thousands of Americans killed, billions of dollars in damage, and aggressive military and security measures in response, we are still living with the war a decade later. A change of presidential administration has not dulled controversy over the most fundamental objectives, strategies, and tactics of the war, or whether it is even a war at all. Confronting Terror sets the stage for a reasoned and robust discussion of the future with a collection of new essays examining the meaning of 9/11 and the law and policy of the war on terrorism. The contributors include principled supporters and critics of the war on terrorism alike, from former Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Michael Mukasey to Alan Dershowitz and former long-time president of the ACLU Nadine Strossen. Confronting Terror presents stark differences of opinion on issues, such as the president's authority to detain, the assertion of state secrets, the limits of surveillance, the use of unmanned drones and targeted killing, the treatment and interrogation of detainees, the Patriot Act, and the peculiar nature of our foe. More surprising, perhaps, are the areas of agreement, particularly the fact that the policies of two very different presidents are remarkably the same. In surveying these views, Yoo and Reuter hope to clarify the debate, both for our society and for those responsible for waging the war. Contributors include John D. Ashcroft, Bob Barr, Michael Chertoff, Alan Dershowitz, Viet D. Dinh, Richard Epstein, Victor Davis Hanson, Arthur Herman, Charles Kesler, Andrew C. McCarthy, Edwin Meese III, Michael B. Mukasey, Theodore B. Olson, A. Raymond Randolph, Dean Reuter, Anthony D. Romero, Paul Rosenzweig, Laurence Silberman, Nadine Strossen, Marc Thiessen, Jonathan Turley, and John C. Yoo.

Read more less

With the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder's direction, Americans are learning what really happens when law-enforcement power is co-opted by politics. In this eye-popping Broadside, Andrew C. McCarthy shows that the biggest beneficiaries have been jihadists. For the past eight years, a group of lawyers volunteered their services to America's enemies. Now, the Justice Department is rife with some of those same lawyers as it enhances due process for terrorists and feeds the international Left's call for war-crimes charges against President Obama's political adversaries. Just consider how the administration has disclosed national defense secrets during wartime or granted the 9/11 mass murderers a civilian trial. The department, moreover, is working to tighten the Democratic Party's grip on power, ignoring the Constitution and green-lighting election fraud and abuse.

Read more less

The United States is not a preternaturally inward-looking nation, and isolation is not the natural disposition of Americans. The real question is not whether Americans are prone to isolation or engagement, but how their engagement with the world has evolved, how events have made the United States a superpower, and how these developments have been guided by political leadership. Indeed, the great debates on foreign affairs in American history have not been about whether to have debates on foreign affairs; they have been between the competing visions of American influence in the world. In Architects of Power, Philip Terzian examines two public figures in the twentieth century who personify, in their lives, careers, and philosophies, the rise of the United States of America to global leadership: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Terzian reveals how both men recognized and acted on the global threats of their time and questions whether America can rise to the same challenges today. Without this clear window into the stricken world that Roosevelt inhabited and Eisenhower understood, we are unlikely to recognize the perils and challenges of the world we have inherited.

Read more less

Since the beginning of the New Deal, American liberals have insisted that the government must do more--much more--to help the poor, to increase economic security, to promote social justice and solidarity, to reduce inequality, and to mitigate the harshness of capitalism. Nonetheless, liberals have never answered, or even acknowledged, the corresponding question: What would be the size and nature of a welfare state that was not contemptibly austere, that did not urgently need new programs, bigger budgets, and a broader mandate? Even though the federal government's outlays have doubled every eighteen years since 1940, liberal rhetoric is always addressed to a nation trapped in Groundhog Day, where every year is 1932, and none of the existing welfare state programs that spend tens of billions of dollars matter, or even exist. Never Enough explores the roots and consequences of liberals' aphasia about the welfare state's ultimate size. It assesses what liberalism's lack of a limiting principle says about the long-running argument between liberals and conservatives, and about the policy choices confronting America in a new century. Never Enough argues that the failure to speak clearly and candidly about the welfare state's limits has grave policy consequences. The worst result, however, is the way it has jeopardized the experiment in self-government by encouraging Americans to regard their government as a vehicle for exploiting their fellow-citizens, rather than as a compact for respecting one another's rights and safeguarding the opportunities of future generations.

Read more less

The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution. What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services--forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives. Economists also left out the negative forces that can hold economies back: bad governance, counterproductive social practices, and patterns of taking wealth instead of creating it. They took for granted secure property rights, honest public servants, and the willingness of individuals to experiment and adapt to novelty. From Poverty to Prosperity is not Tipping Point or Freakonomics. Those books offer a smorgasbord of fascinating findings in economics and sociology, but the findings are only loosely related. From Poverty to Prosperity on the other hand, tells a big picture story about the huge differences in the standard of living across time and across borders. It is a story that draws on research from the world's most important economists and eschews the conventional wisdom for a new, more inclusive, vision of the world and how it works.

Read more less

The political system of contemporary Western democracies is far from perfect. Nevertheless it is the envy of the world. The Art of Politics explains what makes our system as good as it is. It is about the political goods we have reason to value: justice, liberty, order, peace, prosperity, rights, security, and toleration. This book is of interest to thinking people and is not the closed turf of academics and theorists.

Read more less

John Fund explores the real divide the country faces with the looming election. Through wary thoughts on voting integrity, he shows how eletions can be decided by the votes of dead people, illegal felon voters, and absentee voters that simply don't exist. If nothing is done to address the growing cynicism about vote counting, rest assured that another close presidential election that descends into bitter partisan wrangling is just around the corner.

Read more less

Fiercely committed to the ideal of a color-blind America, Ward Connerly has successfully campaigned to ban racial preferences in state institutions in California, Washington and Michigan. Yet, in Lessons from Uncle James, Connerly argues that even after we move beyond the color of our skin, we must still address the content of our character. With this Connerly extols the traditional virtues of personal accountability as a ballast to race industry's culture of victimhood.

Read more less

Global news is generally bad news. On the surface, the story is about war, poverty, ethnic and sectarian strife. Democracy movements advanced by the U.S. government seem to be stalled or even reversed. Yet just below the surface, more hopeful trends are brewing. A new global awareness of the people at "the bottom of the pyramid" is summoning forth an unprecedented response to human need and suffering. It involves a shift from vertical to horizontal power that official aid agencies are only beginning to comprehend. Whereas twenty-five years ago, government aid accounted for 70 percent of all American outflows, today 85 percent of all outflows of resources come from private individuals, businesses, religious congregations, universities, and immigrant communities. If aid policy in the twentieth century relied on top-down bureaucracy dominated by policy specialists and elites, the twenty-first century is shaping up as an era in which citizens, social entrepreneurs, and volunteers link up to solve problems. U.S. military and economic power are basic components of America's presence in the world; but in an environment of rampant anti-Americanism, it is compassion that is America's most consequential export. Civil society, once the distinctive characteristic of American democracy, is now advancing across the globe, carrying with it new forms of philanthropy, citizenship, and volunteerism. Tens of thousands of voluntary associations are prying open closed societies from within, solving problems in new ways, and forming the seedbed for a long-term cultivation of democratic norms. Building Nations from the Bottom Up: The Global Rise of Democratic Society presents a sweeping overview of the forces now shaping the global debate, including citizen-led development projects, poverty-reduction strategies that substitute opportunity for charity, and electronically linked movements to combat corruption and autocratic rule.

Read more less

James Bowman provides a scintillating and fast-paced anatomy of the mainstream media self-generated demise. The Mind of the Media looks behind the headlines to examine mainstream media's governing myths. Writing with acerbic wit, Bowman shows how the mainstream media's embrace of a spurious notion of objectivity, combined with its addiction to scandal, and an unshakable conviction of its own moral superiority have done irreparable damage to the media's public authority.

Read more less

Once a colossus dominating the globe, Europe today is a doddering convalescent. Sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, an addiction to expensive social welfare entitlements, a dwindling birth-rate among native Europeans, and most important, an increasing Islamic immigrant population chronically underemployed yet demographically prolific--all point to a future in which Europe will be transformed beyond recognition, a shrinking museum culture riddled with ever-expanding Islamist enclaves. Decline and Fall tells the story of this decline by focusing on the larger cultural dysfunctions behind the statistics. The abandonment of the Christian tradition that created the West's most cherished ideals--a radical secularism evident in Europe's indifference to God and church--created a vacuum of belief into which many pseudo-religions have poured. Scientism, fascism, communism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, sheer hedonism-- all have attempted and failed, sometimes bloodily, to provide Europeans with an alternative to Christianity that can show them what is worth living and dying for. Meanwhile a resurgent Islam, feeding off the economic and cultural marginalization of European Muslims, knows all too well not just what is worth dying for, but what is worth killing for. Crippled by fashionable self-loathing and fantasies of multicultural inclusiveness, Europeans have met this threat with capitulation instead of strength, appeasement and apologies instead of the demand that immigrants assimilate. As Decline and Fall shows, Europe's solution to these ills--a larger and more powerful European Union--simply exacerbates the problems, for the EU cannot address the absence of a unifying belief that can spur Europe even to defend itself, let alone to recover its lost grandeur. As these problems worsen, Europe will face an unappetizing choice between two somber destinies: a violent nationalistic or nativist reaction, or, more likely, a long descent into cultural senescence and slow-motion suicide.

Read more less

The current frenzy over global warming has galvanized the public and cost taxpayers billons of dollars in federal expenditures for climate research. It has spawned Hollywood blockbusters and inspired major political movements. It has given a higher calling to celebrities and built a lucrative industry for scores of eager scientists. In short, ending climate change has become a national crusade. And yet, despite this dominant and sprawling campaign, the facts behind global warming remain as confounding as ever. In Climate Confusion, distinguished climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer observes that our obsession with global warming has only clouded the issue. Forsaking blindingly technical statistics and doomsday scenarios, Dr. Spencer explains in simple terms how the climate system really works, why man's role in global warming is more myth than science, and how the global warming hype has corrupted Washington and the scientific community. The reasons, Spencer explains, are numerous: biases in governmental funding of scientific research, our misconceptions about science and basic economics, even our religious beliefs and worldviews. From Al Gore to Leonardo DiCaprio, the climate change industry has given a platform to leading figures from all walks of life, as pandering politicians, demagogues and biased scientists forge a self-interested movement whose proposed policy initiatives could ultimately devastate the economies of those developing countries they purport to aid. Climate Confusion is a much needed wake up call for all of us on planet earth. Dr. Spencer's clear-eyed approach, combined with his sharp wit and intellect, brings transparency and levity to the issue of global warming as he takes on wrong-headed attitudes and misguided beliefs that have led to our state of panic. Climate Confusion lifts the shroud of mystery that has hovered here for far too long and offers an end to this frenzy of misinformation in our lives. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Read more less

John Agresto spent nine months in Iraq--from September 2003 to June 2004--working under Ambassador Paul Bremer as senior adviser to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. His daunting task was to assist Iraqis in rebuilding their once distinguished system of colleges, universities, and vocational schools. As he left Iraq, Agresto was asked by the Pentagon to write a few paragraphs about the "lessons learned" during his time there. Those paragraphs were never written, but a book was born instead. Mugged by Reality is partly the memoir of an American civilian and educator trying to help a devastated country revive its educational institutions. It is also a compendium of the successes and failures that followed in the wake of Iraq's liberation. Many books discuss what the United States and its allies did or didn't do, making our mistakes look simple in hindsight: we disbanded the army, we didn't have enough troops, we de-Ba'athified too thoroughly. If only we had done things differently, they say. But the sober truth is that we have been thwarted not simply by failures to "understand the culture of the Middle East," but by failures of Americans in Iraq to understand their own culture and what America really stands for. In the end, Mugged by Reality offers "lessons learned" not only about Iraq and Middle Eastern culture, but also about American democracy and about our common human nature.

Read more less

Milton Himmelfarb, perhaps best known for his quip that Jews earned like Episcopalians but voted like Puerto Ricans, was one of the most unfairly neglected essayists of his time. Now his sister, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, brings together the essential core of his social, political, and theological essays in this wide-ranging collection. From Leo Strauss and Spinoza to Hitler, Israel, and the place of religion in the public square, the sixteen essays in Jews and Gentiles offer readers a feast that is a literary delight as well as an intellectual revelation and a political education.

Read more less

The Prince of the City is at once a fascinating character study of one of America's most charismatic public figures, a history of New York over the last forty years, and a classic inquiry into the issue of how cities thrive or die. Siegel's story culminates with a dramatic account of September 11, 2001, revealing how Giuliani's s eight years in office had prepared him and the city to rise to this tragic occasion and how in the aftermath of the attack he became America's Mayor. Siegel concludes with a look at how Guiliani's successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has handled his legacy and at what lies in Guiliani's political future.

Read more less

This is an unflinching and lyrical meditation on subjects ranging from what parents inadvertently teach us in their deaths, and the way in which figures like Mohanned Atta use death to become gods of their own mad creation.

Read more less

In a series of penetrating reflections on the United States and its institutions in the post-9/11 world, this book offers some answers to questions that people at home and abroad have begun to ask about our country. How did it attain its international preeminence? What exactly is this richest, most powerful of countries made of? Where will its unmatched influence lead? Military historian Frederick Kagan discusses the future of our armed forces and the challenges they will face in defending America's unique position. David B. Hart shows how religion, with all its variety and occasional excess, is "alive and striving in America, with the power to shelter many virtues under its promises of supernatural grace." From the future of the law to the future of higher education, from music to the visual arts, Lengthened Shadows provides a unique situation report on American culture today. Writers and thinkers such as Robert Bork, Hilton Kramer, Roger Kimball and Mark Steyn offer a probing assessment of the institutions that organize our lives--their health, their influence and their prospects--at the beginning of what some commentators are calling "the next American century."

Read more less

Over the last generation, parents have felt increasingly intimidated by child care "experts" and surrendered their role as the primary educators of their children. Brian Robertson believes that this development has proved detrimental to parents and children alike. Theories of development, often colored by ideological positions on the family and its role in society, should take a back seat to the instinctive understanding parents have about what rearing children requires. Parenting is for parents, he believes, not for child development experts and especially not for day care "professionals." The central issue of day care is often framed in a way that pits conservatives against liberals, working moms against stay-at-home moms, and feminists against traditional families. But the real conflict, as Robertson shows in "Day care Deception," is between all parents and the burgeoning day care establishment itself--a multimillion dollar lobby with a vested interest in the expansion of subsidized day care services. Robertson shows how this establishment works to expand its power and silence its critics. Despite the fact that most reliable studies show that commercial day care has a negative effect on the emotional, psychological and even physical development of children, for instance, researchers calling attention to the correlation between aggression among children and too much non-maternal care have seen their work vilified. Scholars have been brought forth to dispute what until now has been obvious to expert and lay person alike--the crucial role of a mother's attention in early childhood development. Studies proving the importance of early parental care have been twisted to bolster the case for day care on the grounds that day care equals "school" and parents' desire to care for their children selfishly deprives them of a "head start." Every year, as Robertson shows, the day care lobby pours more and more money into state and national elections, which is why politicians are beginning to provide more public subsidies for commercial day care while parents are increasingly calling for policy options that would help them stay home to raise their children. The story of day care in America is a complex and daunting one and Brian Robertson has told it with intelligence and insight. Day Care Deception is a brave and thoughtful book about contentious debate whose outcome will have profound consequences for our children and our social future.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

“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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less