Progressive Racism is about the transformation of the civil rights movement from a cause opposing racism—the denigration of individuals on the basis of their skin color – into a movement endorsing race preferences and privileges for select groups based on their skin color. It describes the tragic changes of this cause under the leadership of racial extortionists like Al Sharpton, who took a movement in support of American pluralism and turned it into a movement governed by a lynch mob mentality in which white Americans are regarded as guilty before the fact and African Americans are regarded as innocent even when the facts prove them guilty, even when their crimes are committed against other African Americans.The author of Progressive Racism, David Horowitz, is a witness to these events and betrayals. Horowitz was a participant in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and in 2001 led a national campaign against a proposal for “slavery reparations” that would have required Hispanic, Asian and other Americans who had no role in slavery to pay reparations to African Americans who were never slaves. Progressive Racism examines how the term “racism” has been drained of its original meaning and is now used as a weapon to bludgeon opponents into silence. It describes how the so-called civil rights movement has become an oppressor of African Americans by supporting a failed school system that blights the lives of millions of African American children and a welfare system that has destroyed the black family and created a “underclass” dependent on government charity. It is an indictment of the hypocrisy that today governs discourse on race issues, so that a lynch mob in Ferguson, Missouri seeking to hang a police officer because he was white can be described as a civil rights protest and be supported by the first African American president of the United States.
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.
James Burnham’s 1964 classic, Suicide of the West, remains a startling account on the nature of the modern era. It offers a profound, in depth analysis of what is happening in the world today by putting into focus the intangible, often vague doctrine of American liberalism. It parallels the loosely defined liberal ideology rampant in American government and institutions, with the flow, ebb, growth, climax and the eventual decline and death of both ancient and modern civilizations.Its author maintains that western suicidal tendencies lie not so much in the lack of resources or military power, but through an erosion of intellectual, moral, and spiritual factors abundant in modern western society and the mainstay of liberal psychology.Devastating in its relentless dissection of the liberal syndrome, this book will lead many liberals to painful self-examination, buttress the thinking conservative’s viewpoint, and incite others, no doubt, to infuriation. None can ignore it.
From the world’s most repressive state comes rare good news: the escape to freedom of a small number of its people. It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad.With a journalist’s grasp of events and a novelist’s ear for narrative, Melanie Kirkpatrick tells the story of the North Koreans’ quest for liberty. Travelers on the new underground railroad include women bound to Chinese men who purchased them as brides, defectors carrying state secrets, and POWs from the Korean War held captive in the North for more than half a century. Their conductors are brokers who are in it for the money as well as Christians who are in it to serve God. The Christians see their mission as the liberation of North Korea one person at a time.Just as escaped slaves from the American South educated Americans about the evils of slavery, the North Korean fugitives are informing the world about the secretive country they fled. Escape from North Korea describes how they also are sowing the seeds for change within North Korea itself. Once they reach sanctuary, the escapees channel news back to those they left behind. In doing so, they are helping to open their information-starved homeland, exposing their countrymen to liberal ideas, and laying the intellectual groundwork for the transformation of the totalitarian regime that keeps their fellow citizens in chains.
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.
Before September 11, 2001 we Americans did not think much about freedom or democracy in the Middle East. U.S. policy toward the region aimed to assure a reliable flow of oil, to encourage peace between the Arabs and Israel, and above all, during the Cold War, to prevent our rival from gaining any strategic advantage over us. 9/11 impelled us to reconsider. Now, as we are entangled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan the Mid-East’s political and social quandaries lie at the very core of our foreign policy objectives. And yet, after years of blood and fortune spent on the democratization of the Middle East, the most identifiable personalities in the region are notorious terrorists, backwards autocrats and fanatical preachers. As Joshua Muravchik demonstrates in Trailblazers of the Arab Spring, there are in fact also heroic democrats and liberals in these lands of anti-democratic fanaticism, and the fight they are fighting is also our fight.Muravchik brings to light the stories of seven remarkable people, six Arabs and an Iranian. Five are men; two, women. Four are Sunnis, two are Shiites, and the seventh is mixed. All are devoted passionately to a cause, and, while the angles from which they attack it are varied, the larger goal is the same for all seven—to make their countries more open and democratic. Trailblazers of the Arab Spring reminds us that freedom is a prize that must be won through struggle and sacrifice, and it introduces us to our anonymous friends who have consecrated their lives to the birth of free societies in the Middle East.
Since the day Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president of the United States, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, the Democratic Party has been at war with America. With a history that includes murder, treason, slavery, segregation, sedition, bribery, and systemic vote theft, it can argued that the Democrats are, at root, the anti-American party.In this incendiary Broadside – a heartfelt j’accuse – Michael Walsh traces the illicit and immoral history of the Democrats from Burr and the founding of the quintessential big-city political machine, Tammany Hall, to the “by any means necessary,” Saul Alinsky-inspired presidency of Barack Obama and his Windy City cronies. The prosecutorial argument: The Democrats, in essence, are nothing less than a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.
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.
For most of the last century, William F. Buckley Jr. was the leading figure in the conservative movement in America. The magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, brought together writers representing every strand of conservative thought, and refined those ideas over the decades that followed. Buckley’s own writings were a significant part of this development. He was not a theoretician but a popularizer, someone who could bring conservative ideas to a vast audience through dazzling writing and lively wit.Culled from millions of published words spanning nearly sixty years, Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations offers Buckley’s commentary on the American and international scenes, in areas ranging from Kremlinology to rock music. The subjects are widely varied, but there are common threads linking them all: a love for the Western tradition and its American manifestation; the belief that human beings thrive best in a free society; the conviction that such a society is worth defending at all costs; and an appreciation for the quirky individuality that free people inevitably develop.
"I never ask for mercy and seek no one's sympathy. I would never, as was once needlessly feared in this court, be a fugitive from justice in this country, only a seeker of it."—Conrad Black, in his statement to the court, June 24, 2011In 1993, Conrad Black was the proprietor of London's Daily Telegraph and the head of one of the world's largest newspaper groups. He completed a memoir in 1992, A Life in Progress, and «great prospects beckoned.» In 2004, he was fired as chairman of Hollinger International after he and his associates were accused of fraud. Here, for the first time, Black describes his indictment, four-month trial in Chicago, partial conviction, imprisonment, and largely successful appeal.In this unflinchingly revealing and superbly written memoir, Black writes without reserve about the prosecutors who mounted a campaign to destroy him and the journalists who presumed he was guilty. Fascinating people fill these pages, from prime ministers and presidents to the social, legal, and media elite, among them: Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Jean Chrétien, Rupert Murdoch, Izzy Asper, Richard Perle, Norman Podhoretz, Eddie Greenspan, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.Woven throughout are Black's views on big themes: politics, corporate governance, and the U.S. justice system. He is candid about highly personal subjects, including his friendships – with those who have supported and those who have betrayed him – his Roman Catholic faith, and his marriage to Barbara Amiel. And he writes about his complex relations with Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, and in particular the blow he has suffered at the hands of that nation.In this extraordinary book, Black maintains his innocence and recounts what he describes as «the fight of and for my life.» A Matter of Principle is a riveting memoir and a scathing account of a flawed justice system.