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A law professor's memoir of his own ascendancy from prosecutor to influential legal thinker.From prosecuting murderers in Chicago, to arguing before the Supreme Court, to authoring more than a dozen books, Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett has played an integral role in the rise of originalism--the movement to identify, restore, and defend the original meaning of the Constitution. Thanks in part to his efforts, by 2018 a majority of sitting Supreme Court justices self-identified as "originalists." After writing seminal books on libertarianism and contract law, Barnett pivoted to constitutional law. His mission to restore "the lost Constitution" took him from the schoolhouse to the courthouse, where he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzeles v. Raich in the Supreme Court--a case now taught to every law student. Later, he devised and spearheaded the constitutional challenge to Obamacare.All this earned him major profiles in such publications as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times. Now he recounts his compelling journey from a working-class kid in Calumet City, Illinois to "Washington Power Breaker," as the Congressional Quarterly Weekly called him.In A Life for Liberty, Barnett writes candidly about his career strategies, and how he overcame his outsider status, his insecurities, and the mistakes he made along the way. The engaging story of his rise from obscurity to one of the most influential thinkers in America is an inspiring how-to guide for anyone seeking real-world advancement of justice and liberty for all.

Trust in American institutions is at historic lows. The answer from the Progressive Left? Make voting and counting ballots even more complicated.Ranked-choice voting is their latest fad to remake elections. It makes voting harder: longer lines, more mistakes, and lower turnout. And it makes election administration so complicated that, in 2022, one California county certified the wrong winner in a school board race.In this Broadside, two election experts explain what ranked-choice voting is, who is behind it, and why it threatens the integrity of our elections.

"Many Americans believe that the United States is in decline. They see a country that has become unrecognizable: where individuals are reduced to their race, ethnicity, or sexual identity; where children are indoctrinated into radical ideologies; where anti-semitism has become widespread. This book explains how all of these ills are rooted in Marxism. To be sure, it is not Soviet Marxism, but a Marxism that was shaped by European intellectuals, adapted and refined by America's student radicals of the 1960s, and diffused throughout the culture as those student radicals became professors, community organizers, and leaders"--

Black Americans have arguably arrived at the height of their cultural prominence. In politics, entertainment, academia, and nearly every sphere of influence, "black issues" dominate the national discussion. Yet many black Americans are suffering more than ever from the blight of poverty, physical and mental health struggles, lack of opportunity, and failing schools. How do these signs of success on the surface coexist with social stagnation on the ground in the black community?This edited volume, sponsored by the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and featuring contributions from W.B. Allen, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (ret.), Ian Rowe, Sally Pipes, Stephen Moore, and others, addresses this question in light of American values and the history of constitutional jurisprudence. In the 1860s, black America was promised emancipation but continued to experience subjugation. In the 1960s, black America was promised equality but was frequently exploited. Racial discrimination played a role, but in the intervening decades misguided progressive policies and the normalization of victimhood rhetoric has proven even more disastrous. By failing to live up to American ideals, our nation denied many black Americans their chance at the American Dream. The scholars and luminaries who contributed to this volume believe that what has been lost can be recovered. If our nation recognizes the history of our current predicament, embraces the founding principles that made America an economic powerhouse, and commits to an agenda of empowering fiscal, educational, and faith and family-affirming policies, then black Americans can overcome the obstacles that most hamper progress in their communities.

Since there are many famous writers - for example, Balzac, Proust Oscar Wilde - buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, Anthony Daniels reasoned that there must be many more forgotten ones. And so it turned out. They are not forgotten because they were bad or uninteresting writers, and when the author disinterred their writings he found a literary and historical treasure trove.

Charles R. Kesler, an eminent scholar and prodigious editor, has exerted a profound influence on the study of American politics and the practice of American conservatism.A precocious high-school student, he impressed a visiting William F. Buckley Jr. who, before becoming a life-long friend, wrote him a recommendation letter to Yale. Kesler asked for another—to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD under the legendary professor Harvey C. Mansfield. An early passion for political journalism, played out largely on the pages of National Review, led Kesler to author an NR cover story on his third great influence, Harry V. Jaffa.Kesler became a faculty colleague of Jaffa’s at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and is perhaps best known as the editorial helmsman of the Claremont Review of Books. The author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism and Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness, Kesler also co-edited (with William F. Buckley Jr.) Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought. His edited volume edition of The Federalist Papers is the best-selling edition version in the country.In this volume, Kesler’s students, friends, and colleagues commemorate his four-decade career as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

The Founding Fathers were men of high intellect, steely integrity, and enormous ambition—but they were not all of one mind. They came from particular places in already diverse colonies, and they all sought their futures in different horizons. Without reliable maps of even nearby terrain, they contributed in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways to the expansion of a young republic on the seaboard edge of a continent of whose vast expanses they were largely ignorant. Mental Maps of the Founders explores the geographic orientation—the mental maps—of six of the Founders. Three were Virginians, who vied to expand their new nation toward different points of the compass. One, a refugee from Puritan Boston to more tolerant Philadelphia, built a commercial and journalistic empire spanning seaboard colonies and the West Indies. Two came from buzzing commercial entrepots of glaringly different character, the sugar-and-slave island of St. Croix in the Caribbean and the stern Swiss Calvinistic city-state of Geneva. These disparate origins informed their foundation and management of a financial and taxation system that enabled the new republic’s commerce to thrive. Inspired by the many wonderful books about the Founding Fathers, the journalist, map lover, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Michael Barone set out to explore the geographical orientation—the mental maps—of the Founders. In a series of reflective essays, Barone shows how the Founders’ mental maps helped develop the contours and character of a young republic whose geographical features and political boundaries were yet unknown.

Over the past few years, sustainable investing—which is based on the theory that subjectiveenvironmental, social and governance or ESG factors should drive corporate policy and investmentdecisions—has swept across Wall Street, spurred on by the United Nations, sovereign governments andfinancial regulators and cheered on by academics, environmental activists, social justice warriors andthe media. To date, there has been little public resistance or analytical pushback as the ESG orthodoxyhas integrated itself into almost every corner of the financial markets. By 2030, the iron curtain ofsustainability will have fully descended across Wall Street. This book is meant to provide a detailedrebuttal to the case for sustainable investing from the perspective of a long-time Wall Street analyst andinvestor and latter-day finance professor. Sustainable investing is a scam because it is not aboutgenerating excess returns for investors or furthering ethical goals such as improving society or savingthe planet; rather, it is about controlling the world’s financial system and determining the allocation ofcapital and investment flows across the markets. It is liberal progressive politics masquerading asfinance whose objective is to create a compliant corporate sector that serves as both Greek chorus andfunding source for the environmental and social causes championed by government and the elite class.This book is designed to expose this truth in plain-spoken language—free of financial jargon—to reachthe widest possible audience, including the silent majority on Wall Street now afraid to speak up aboutESG.

Both of the authors found themselves savagely "canceled" by their peers in Japanese studies programs in the U.S. for refusing to follow the Woke line on the World War II "comfort women."  Contrary to the party line in American humanities departments, the women were not slaves.  They were prostitutes.  And the notion that they were anything but prostitutes owes itself to a hoax perpetrated by a Japanese communist author in the 1980s.  Any serious Japanese intellectual (of any political perspective) understands this, and many intellectuals in South Korea understand it as well.  It is a mark of the intellectual bankruptcy of the hyper-politicized humanities departments that they continue to cling to this 1980s-vintage hoax.      Through its "comfort women" framework, the Japanese military extended its licensing regime for domestic brothels to the brothels next to its overseas bases.  Through that regime, it imposed the strenuous health standards it needed to control the venereal disease that had debilitated its troops in earlier wars.  These "comfort stations" recruited their prostitutes through variations on the standard indenture contracts that the licensed brothels had used in both Korea and Japan.  Some women took the jobs because they were tricked by fraudulent recruiters.  Some took them under pressure from abusive parents.  But the rest seem to have taken the jobs for the money.

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.

"Ever since Plato's Republic, the study of statecraft has been a staple of Western discourse, and so has the study of particular leaders. Although Jewish scholars, thinkers, and popularizers have contributed notably to this genre, strikingly few have turned their attention to the history of Jewish leaders-that is, leaders specifically of the Jewish people-in particular. And yet there has been no lack of such outstanding figures, from the biblical period of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land and once again in present-day Israel or during the millennia of exile and formal Jewish statelessness in the Diaspora. This book, devoted to ten of the most colorful, fascinating, and consequential Jewish political leaders over the past three millennia, fills the gap. Among the ten, men and women alike, some were firmly bound to Judaic religious teachings and others less so, but guiding all of them was the fixed lodestar of their own Jewish identity. By the mid-20th century, the legacy of past generations would inspire modern successors bent on the re-founding of the sovereign Jewish state, one of the greatest political feats in human history. In delving into the unique circumstances and predicaments faced by these ten, and into the characteristics that mark them and their statesmanship as specifically Jewish, readers will also become familiar with what Jewish tradition has to say about the demands of statesmanship and, by inference, with the qualities needed by successful Jewish political leaders encountering the challenges of today and tomorrow"--

"The Conservative Establishment consensus of the past two generations has almost totally broken down. The right needs to rethink its positions on all the essential questions: race, male/female, religion, the economy, foreign policy, and other major issues. This book hopes to frame the direction of where the right is going"--

"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 over a 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 jetsetter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining pieces full of exuberance and authority. Buckley's talent for arranging a mise-en-scáene 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 60-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 râemoulade, fresh figs, and a nice Bordeaux."--

Willmoore Kendall's influence on American conservatism began with his role as mentor to William F. Buckley, Jr. at Yale, and it has probably grown in recent years. Both a political philosopher and a political scientist, Kendall (1909-1967) thought deeply about the core ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the American political tradition as expressed in documents ranging from colonial-era charters to the Federalist Papers-their origins, their correct interpretation, and how well our system fulfilled them. He also warned of the potential for another civil war if citizens became too divided on fundamental ideals. Kendall posed unconventional questions, such as whether individual rights played a central role in the American tradition. On familiar questions he reached unusual conclusions, such as that Congress should legislate slowly and with minimal controversy, or that conservatives should not take a "storming-from-outside" stance against "big government" but instead provide confident moral leadership. Besides being an incisive thinker, Kendall was an engaging teacher-despite his cantankerous personality-and he deployed a compelling prose style that combines meticulous logic with a colorful plain-spokenness. Today, what might be called a "Kendall school" of thought competes with libertarianism, traditionalism, and neoconservatism among right-leaning scholas and writers. Though often imprecisely represented by followers, Kendall's thinking can be summarized as a combination of three elements: populism, in the sense of a political and moral faith in the American people; counter-majoritarianism, or belief in a more complex political culture than "majority rule" as it is usually understood; and an insistence on the need to maintain a "public orthodoxy" or common political creed by social pressure and, if necessary, by legislation against extreme ideologies such as communism. David Frisk's intellectual biography focuses particularly on those three themes in Kendall's writing and assesses their implications. The result is a perceptive account of the career and contemporary relevance of a brilliant, original scholar of the American constitutional order.

"The Republican Party can recover from the shellacking of 2020 and become America's natural governing party by returning to its roots as the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. It must champion the common good and the American ideals of equality and liberty that are opposed by a Democratic party that seeks to divide Americans by race and gender. The GOP must also become the party of the American Dream, the idea that whoever you are and wherever you come from, you can get ahead and know that your children will have it better than you did. It must show how the Democrats became the party of inequality and immobility through policies which benefited their elites and created a new aristocracy. What structural racism exists in America has been created by Democrats through their education, immigration and job-killing policies. Americans aren't cynical and oppose public corruption. The GOP stupidly gave the issue away to the Democrats and needs to become the party of clean government and campaign finance reform. To return to its roots, the GOP must abandon the ideologies of the last 60 years. The party's spokesmen communicated a perfect fidelity to a few, simple ideas but also an indifference to people. Trump showed how mistaken this was, and Republicans will not return to power if they abandon the ideas he brought to the party in 2016. Doing all that, the GOP will become the only party that Americans can, with honor, support"--

"Americans often use the words progressive, liberal, and radical without considering their historical and political origins. While each movement rejected the older American republican principles, there were differences between Teddy Roosevelt's Anglo-Protestant progressive social gospelers who battled the trusts and checked immigration, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson's secular liberals who introduced state capitalism and a civil rights agenda, and the 1960s radicals who protested the Great Society and war in Vietnam. Rather than a peaceful outgrowth, each movement rose in criticism of the one before. This book succinctly and thoroughly clarifies progressivism, liberalism, and radicalism in the history of ideas. But its history of the rise of the Global American Empire is only complete with the story of its fall. The revolution of the 1960s birthed a class divide. Elites on the left and right turned against the industrial middle class to erect an oligarchy at home and globalization abroad. While the radicals ensconced themselves in bureaucracy and academia to complete their systems of Identity Politics, neoliberal elites introduced monopoly capitalism, open borders, and outsourcing. The neoliberals' economic and military failures marked a crisis of legitimacy. In the Great Awokening of Barack Obama's second term, the American oligarchs kissed the ring of Identity Politics and used the covid-19 pandemic and myths of insurrection to strip away the rights of American citizens. Today a kleptocracy of incompetent, corrupt, and degenerate rulers drain the wealthiest and most powerful empire in history"--

"This memoir is the story of how curiosity led me to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, including the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome, and the diamond cartel in South Africa. To learn about them, I often found myself a fly-on-the-wall at the highest reaches of the establishment where I saw how presidents, tycoons, bankers, and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. Some accuse me of being a conspiracist, but that is not correct. I am essentially a puzzle solver ... My prime interest has always been in finding gaps in the conventional wisdom about an event. How I came to be a pursuer of lost truths is a curious story of self-actualization"--

Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965‿1968 is the long-awaited sequel to the immensely influential Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954‿1965. Like its predecessor, this book overturns the conventional wisdom using a treasure trove of new sources, many of them from the North Vietnamese side. Rejecting the standard depiction of U.S. military intervention as a hopeless folly, it shows America‿s war to have been a strategic necessity that could have ended victoriously had President Lyndon Johnson heeded the advice of his generals. In light of Johnson‿s refusal to use American ground forces beyond South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland employed the best military strategy available. Once the White House loosened the restraints on Operation Rolling Thunder, American bombing inflicted far greater damage on the North Vietnamese supply system than has been previously understood, and it nearly compelled North Vietnam to capitulate. The book demonstrates that American military operations enabled the South Vietnamese government to recover from the massive instability that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. American culture sustained public support for the war through the end of 1968, giving South Vietnam realistic hopes for long-term survival. America‿s defense of South Vietnam averted the imminent fall of key Asian nations to Communism and sowed strife inside the Communist camp, to the long-term detriment of America‿s great-power rivals, China and the Soviet Union.

In his newest book, Charles Murray fearlessly states two controversial truths about the American population: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. If we aim to navigate public policy with wisdom and realism, these realities must be brought into the light. “Facing Reality provides a powerful overview of one perspective that those who allege sweeping forms of systemic or institutional racism find it all to convenient to ignore‿or cancel without due consideration.â€?‿Wilfred Reilly, Commentary“Facing Reality is a bold, important book which should be widely read and discussed.â€? ‿Amy L. Wax, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, for the Claremont Review of BooksThe charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities. What good can come of bringing them into the open? America‿s most precious ideal is what used to be known as the American Creed: People are not to be judged by where they came from, what social class they come from, or by race, color, or creed. They must be judged as individuals. The prevailing Progressive ideology repudiates that ideal, demanding instead that the state should judge people by their race, social origins, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. We on the center left and center right who are the American Creed‿s natural defenders have painted ourselves into a corner. We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must. Facing Reality is a step in that direction.

"When it comes to predicting how technology changes our near future, there are two camps. One says we live at a time of a "new normal" where we've netted all the low-hanging fruit and ordering a ride or food on a smartphone is as good as it's going to get. The other camp sees lots of changes but mainly in destroying jobs and traditional businesses. They're both wrong, predicts Mark P. Mills, whose earlier book "The Bottomless Well" debunked the bleak consensus view that the world had reached "peak oil" production in the early 2000s. History will record the 2020s as one of the episodic pivots in human progress where technology-driven prosperity goes into high gear. And it doesn't come from any single 'big' invention, but from the convergence of radical advances in technologies in three domains: the "Cloud," history's biggest and newest infrastructure, built from next-generation microprocessors and democratizing artificial intelligence; new kinds of machines used for making and moving everything; and the emergence of unprecedented and novel materials from which everything is built. We've seen this pattern before. The structure of the technological revolution that drove the last long-run expansion can be traced to the 1920s. It too came from the same kind of convergence: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). It's true that we've wrung all the magic out of the last boom. But the next one starts now. The U.S. is again at the epicenter of these innovations, one that promise to upend the status quo in manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy and entertainment"--

President Obama has declared that the standard by which all policies and policy outcomes are judged is fairness. He declared in 2011 that "we've sought to ensure that every citizen can count on some basic measure of security. We do this because we recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us, at any moment, might face hard times, might face bad luck, might face a crippling illness or a layoff." And that, he says, is why we have a social safety net. He says that returning to a standard of fairness where anyone can get ahead through hard work is the "issue of our time." And perhaps it is.This book explores what it means for our economic system and our economic results to be "fair." Does it mean that everyone has a fair shot? Does it mean that everyone gets the same amount? Does it mean the government can assert the authority to forcibly take from the successful and give to the poor? Is government supposed to be Robin Hood determining who gets what? Or should the market decide that? The surprising answer: nations with free market systems that allow people to get ahead based on their own merit and achievement are the fairest of them all.

People are who they are because of what they have been through, where they came from, who they learned from, and all the things that have happened to them. The same is true not just for individuals, but also for families, communities, and nations. America, too, has its own unique character, also formed by its memories, history, things it has been through, and what it has learned. If people, communities, or even nations lose their memory, they lose their character. That is why cultures throughout the world work at maintaining their identity and passing traditions along to future generations. But what if a nation purposely decides it no longer wants to remember its history? What if a country imposes amnesia on itself?Helen Krieble argues persuasively that this is precisely what has happened to America. It has lost the memory of its own founding principles, and the sacrifices made over the past 250 years to preserve them. The nation is losing its character. She writes that America cannot be preserved as “the last best hope of Earthâ€? if its own people no longer understand why that is true and are no longer willing to do what it takes to preserve it. “The duties of citizenship are vitally important,â€? Krieble writes, “but they are not complicated. It is our duty, as the owners, to defend our freedom against all threats, and to pass it along to future generations undiminished.â€?Americans are failing in that duty, but Krieble says there is still time to cure our national amnesia. It begins with rebuilding our understanding of, and commitment to, those founding principles, regaining our national memory.