Free Republic

In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton address the economic forces affecting less-educated American whites. Their analysis admirably deviates from academic consensus by acknowledging the substantive demands underlying today’s populist movements. The authors attempt, moreover, to present both sides of economic arguments. What’s missing, though, is recognition that the Trump administration, in many respects, is implementing meaningful policy solutions to address these issues. (I should note here that Professor Case taught one of my favorite courses in college.) As Case and Deaton note, the white working class has had a tough...

America’s system of education has failed in one of its most important goals: forming future generations of American citizens. This is particularly true in higher education, where students are encouraged to become “global citizens” instead of Americans. At many of our institutions of higher learning, character education has been replaced by moral relativism at the same time that rigorous academic standards have given way to a mentality of “college for all.” We are seeing the results of our education deficit now, as rioters tear down statues that commemorate not only the former Confederacy, but America’s founding fathers, abolitionists, and former...

What are the odds? It’s a favorite expression. You will find it in my previous columns. My youngest daughter gave me a copy of Mike Lindell’s new book for Father’s Day. A fabulous gift. The book is hard to put down. I prefer biographies, stories about ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. Novels are not my cup of tea. Most autobiographies are written by fairly famous people who want to set the record straight about their lives and their actions. Attempting to rewrite history, they tend to downplay their failures and accentuate their accomplishments. Mike Lindell turns that model...

A writer friend of mine once told me “writing is therapeutic.” As one of the more than 11 million residents locked down in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese writer Fang Fang probably felt the same way when she decided to record her experiences online daily during the lockdown.She started posting entries on Jan. 25, two days after the Chinese government quarantined Wuhan and several nearby cities with a total population of 60 million. She entered her last entry on April 8, when the lockdown was formally lifted. These entries have now become a new book, titled...

Bolton is a thin-skinned and snarky figure who succeeded in convincing a surprising number of smart people in Washington that he is somehow serious and statesmanlike. In the good old days of the internet blogosphere, there was a running bit at Jeff Goldstein’s blog Protein Wisdom which provided a name for John Bolton’s prominent mustache – “Regis”, a globe-trotting nuke-loving Hamas-bashing sexually aggressive bon-vivant with lush whiskey-tinged follicles. The image is ridiculous of course, but it is not far from the image the real John Bolton paints of himself in the absurdly entertaining pages of his book, the inaptly named...

Jeanine Cummins’ bestselling novel 'American Dirt' has elicited protests over the author's lack of Latinx credentials, but the bigger problem is that the book is plodding moralistic melodrama. In Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt, main character Lydia Pérez is a middle class, college-educated bookstore owner in Acapulco. She has a nine-year-old son with her husband Sebastián who is an investigative reporter at the local newspaper. She is bored by her clientele, who mostly consist of tourists and buyers of knickknacks, until one day a man with huge soul and an exquisite taste that nearly matches her own enters her shop...

A question of power is at the heart of the new and interesting book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. The Anglo-American liberal duo did a tremendous service to the academy in 2018 by hoaxing several “grievance studies” journals that publish shoddy activist scholarship. Their book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why This Harms Everybody,” explains the theoretical foundations of activist disciplines in the academy and warns policymakers about the threats they pose. The central thesis is thus: Our institutions of higher education are under attack from the virus of post-modernism, along with...

I remember as a twenty-two-year-old being excited when I saw a new book called the The Mists of Avalon by an author called Marion Zimmer Bradley. Mists was presented as the retelling of the Arthurian legend from the point of view of the women of Camelot, which I thought was a thrilling idea. However, I found the book heavy on paganism and morbid, explicit sex scenes, but light on romance, heroism, chivalry, mystery, faith and all the qualities I had come to love in the Camelot stories. I never read any of the author's other books and did not care...

... In Debunking Howard Zinn, Mary Grabar has performed the absolutely necessary task that her title promises, and has done so with admirable energy, persistence, and relentless attention to detail, leaving Zinn’s already shaky credibility in utter ruins. She brings the intensive scrutiny of a jeweler’s eye to Zinn’s work, topic by topic, and shows in no uncertain terms how flawed and unreliable it is. But that is not all. She also shows us Zinn the man: An utter charlatan and naked partisan, an admirer of Stalin and Mao, a relentless self-promoter and self-mythologizer, and a media-savvy celebrity of the...

College sports are a gigantic entertainment business that have nothing to do with the missions of the schools. Frequently, the highest-paid employee of a school is the football or basketball coach, and the athletics budget is hugely subsidized by fees paid by financially strapped students. Players who read and write at a middle-school level (if even that) are recruited to help teams win, but the academic work they do is laughable. Schools rack up big debts trying to win glory on the gridiron or court, even if it means scrimping on faculty salaries and building maintenance. How did this lamentable...

Mary Grabar's book, 'Debunking Howard Zinn,' takes aim at the celebrated historian who is as influential as he is ideological and dishonest. Howard Zinn’s book, The People’s History of the United States, is one of the most famous American history textbooks ever written. His goal was to change the way Americans saw their own history by writing from the perspective of those he called “underdogs.” In doing so, he thoroughly distorts the true historical record and paints America as an inherently unjust nation.Mary Grabar believes that at the root of his agenda is a desire to see America turned into...

Christopher Caldwell’s new book, The Age of Entitlement, offers a striking revision of recent American history that has the advantage of being readily summarized. The polarization of political opinion and the dissolution of the American fabric, he argues, has its roots in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which represented a sharp break with the past. “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core,” he explains, “were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the original one was frequently incompatible.” The common narrative surrounding civil rights,...

In Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes revisits the welfare programs of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to show not only how misguided they were but also what a warning they present to those who wish to resurrect and extend such programs. “The contest between capitalism and socialism is on again,” the author writes in her introduction. Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington....

Our ground school at MIT starts today (videos from last year linked from course web site). I’m hoping that there are no similarities with a recently finished novel: Campusland. Epigraph: Colleges don’t make fools, they only develop them. —GEORGE HORACE LORIMERHow to be a popular university president: The protesters spotted Milton and instantly became animated. “Hey, Milton! Divest from Israel now! Stop the murder!” cried one. “Divest now! Divest now!” Their homemade signs thrust up and down like pistons. Milton smiled and walked over. “It’s great to see everyone. Really great.” He began shaking hands, much to the bewilderment of...

The handcuffed woman glowered as federal investigators swarmed the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, storage unit where her “combat materials” were stashed. But not even a hardened homegrown terrorist like 29-year-old Susan Rosenberg was ready to die this November night in 1984. “Put out the f–king cigarette,” she growled at an officer who had unwisely lit up. Rosenberg knew that the unit was stuffed with 740 pounds of leaking explosives. The nitroglycerine oozing from her poorly maintained cache of dynamite — stolen from a Texas construction firm four years earlier — was dangerous and highly unstable. Rosenberg and an accomplice, Tim...

This book is more than 1000 pp., here are my impressions: 1. About 600 pp. of this book is a carefully done history of the accumulation and sometimes dissipation of wealth and property. You can evaluate that material without reference to any particular set of political views. 2. At some point the book veers into partisan issues such as the wealth tax. Many of those parts remain interesting, but it also becomes clear that Piketty is “out to lunch,” to wit (p.591): To return to the Soviet attitude toward poverty, it is important to try to understand why the government...

About 40 percent of Americans who enroll in college drop out before earning a certificate or degree. A high percentage of those who drop out are from poor families; they attended K-12 schools where academic standards were low and students who really tried to learn faced peer rejection for “acting white.” Still, some graduate and get into college. Then what? In The College Dropout Scandal, author David Kirp, an emeritus professor of public policy in the University of California-Berkeley’s Goldman School, argues that what happens to those students should be regarded as a national scandal because the colleges that enrolled...

How can government get rid of poverty? It’s a question that gets asked not in a society where almost everyone is poor but in one giddy with surging growth and concerned about those who seem left behind—a society whose leaders have “an almost mystical belief in the infinite potentials of American society.” Those are the words of Paul Jacobs, a prominent left-wing journalist and activist a half-century ago, quoted by Amity Shlaes in “Great Society: A New History.” Just as she presented a skeptical alternative to New Deal historians’ accounts of the 1930s in “The Forgotten Man” (2007), Ms. Shlaes...

One morning in 1972, the French author Jean Raspail was at his home on the Mediterranean coast when he had a vision of a million refugees clamoring to enter Europe. “Armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil,” he wrote. “To let them in would destroy us. To reject them would destroy them.” At the time Raspail was a respected writer best known for his travelogues. But the racist novel that resulted from that episode, “The Camp of the Saints,” would become his most...

Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a greengrocer who rose to become Britain’s first female prime minister, won three national elections, oversaw an economic revolution at home, and faced down the U.S.S.R. -- earning her the moniker “The Iron Lady” from the Soviets. She didn’t, however, meet the mark for Hillary Clinton’s book on gutsy women. The former secretary of state, who failed in her 2016 bid to become America's first female president, is out with a new book, “The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience.”