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Sowell's top 10 worst US presidents.I think he's nailed to top five. 1. bammy 2. LBJ 3. FDR 4. Wilson 5. Carter

Because this is a podcast, I'll provide a summary: Sowell says Robert Francis Prevost was elevated to Pope because he is an able administrator, a voice of calmness, and accumulated a cosmopolitan resume. His elevation to Pope followed another who presided over social activism and moral drift. Sowell says Pope Francis gained applause from secular institutions and the elite of the world, at the cost of shrinking congregations; and, the Cardinal-Electors chose Prevost for preservation rather than change.

Sowell and Robinson announce Sowell’s new web site, FactsAgainstRhetoric.org

The incoming Trump administration will confront some huge financial challenges. It will have to cope with the vast increase in the national debt created by the Biden administration’s reckless spending. It will also need to maintain the solvency of the Social Security system after decades of financial irresponsibility by politicians of both parties. On top of all this, there is an urgent need to build up American military defenses, which have been neglected while taxpayers’ money has been lavishly spent on such things as subsidizing electric cars and paying hotel expenses for illegal immigrants. There is no question that doing...

The Devastating Legacy of Obama's Presidency - A Point of No Return | Thomas Sowell

Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge: After growing up in Harlem, Thomas Sowell served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War, then received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. After teaching at universities that included Cornell, Brandeis, and UCLA, Dr. Sowell became a fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1977. Thomas Sowell is the author of some forty books, including his newest volume, Social Justice Fallacies. And this past spring, he turned ninety-three. Tom, welcome back. Thomas Sowell: Oh, good being here. Robinson: Dr. Martin Luther King...

A professor who sued UCLA after he was suspended in the wake of the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter riots after refusing a request to grade black students leniently will soon get his day in court. UCLA accounting lecturer Gordon Klein is demanding well over $19 million in damages in a lawsuit scheduled to go to trial March 4 in a Santa Monica courthouse. The two sides have engaged in legal wrangling since September 2021, when Klein first filed suit — including a failed attempt by UCLA’s lawyers to get the case tossed by summary judgment. The causes of action to...

Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest...

Thomas Sowell, now 93 years old, is one of the most esteemed and prolific authors and social commentators today. Trained as an economist at Harvard and the University of Chicago, he has written more than thirty books, and from 1991 to 2016, he had a nationally syndicated column. Sowell’s readers and admirers include the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and the former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson. Pinker has characterized Sowell as the most underrated author in history. He also stated that, “Sowell is a libertarian conservative, which makes him taboo in mainstream intellectual circles, but even those who disagree are...

30 Priceless Quotes from the Great Thomas SowellSowell has an amazing ability to communicate timeless truths succinctly.Economics is often referred to as "the dismal science," but few have done more in history to help its reputation than Thomas Sowell.The 92-year-old economist has authored more than 45 books, including bestsellers such as Basic Economics, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, and Economic Facts and Fallacies. He has also written on politics, sociology, education, race, and much more.Sowell’s work has been cited extensively. Between 1991 and 1995 he was the most cited black economist and the second most cited between 1971 and 1990.He...

This is an excerpt from Thomas Sowell's 'Dismantling America'

OREGON—Oregon high schools have removed requirements to learn reading, writing, math, and basic social skills for kids graduating and moving on into the real world. The reason, according to one Oregon school board member, is to make sure they aren't influenced by far-right misinformation present in Thomas Sowell books, Jordan Peterson books, and other Nazi-adjacent authors. "We have to protect these kids," said Dr. Ethan Bremington (they/them), a superintendent of one Portland high school. "They were learning to read and going off and reading unapproved material. We really hoped they would use their reading skills to read The Communist Manifesto...

Over the last, terrible schoolyear, appreciators of educational freedom and excellence can at least take heart that their cause is winning the esteem of many parents. This owes not only to the poor behavior of American educrats and their unionized minions, but also to the spiritedness of school choice advocates—noteworthy among them, the masterly economist Thomas Sowell. When Sowell turned 90 a year ago, he concurrently published Charter Schools and Their Enemies, a superb book among a superb oeuvre. Lovers of free enterprise and public virtue should immerse themselves in the latter, and in Jason L. Riley’s splendid new Sowell...

Thomas Sowell is an icon. And, now, he has a biographer. While Sowell himself has written, by my count, 43 books, Jason Riley’s 2021 Maverick seems remarkably to be the first-ever major press biography of the heterodox African-American giant. Riley’s book sums up most of the key themes of Sowell’s thought, including the Anointed and Constrained visions of human behavior, the fact that the plain existence of racism does not explain most differences in group performance, and the idea of quantitative culturalism as an alternative to both “critical race theory” and genetic determinism. Sowell’s biographer also sums up two factual...

The economist Thomas Sowell distinguished himself in the early 1970s as a critic of the traditional civil rights leadership, but in earlier decades he had been optimistic about the direction of the civil rights movement. Sowell was born into an extremely poor family in rural Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and raised in a New York City ghetto in the 1940s. Like many other blacks of that time and in those places, his family was uneducated. The men mostly worked as laborers or in the service sector, and the women typically were domestics. Racist laws had reduced opportunities...

Thomas Sowell is one of the towering American intellectuals of our time. An economist trained at the University of Chicago and a social theorist of the first rank, he has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University since 1980. He has written an astonishing fifty books (if you count revised and expanded editions), numerous essays, and a long-running, twice-a-week newspaper column. Extraordinarily wide ranging, he has covered everything from the rudiments of economics to race relations, the housing crisis of 2008 to late-talking children. His best known book, Basic Economics (2000), a best-selling, chart-, graph-, and...

CHICAGO, IL—Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was seen running for her life this afternoon. Observers said that Lightfoot exploded into a frantic sprint after she saw Thomas Sowell approaching to interview her. According to sources, Lightfoot had recently said she "would only grant one-on-one interviews to journalists of color." Moments later Thomas Sowell crashed through a nearby wall in a fashion reminiscent of the Kool-Aid Man. Lightfoot, living up to her name, went into a mad dash and has not been seen since. People at the scene said Sowell brushed the drywall dust off of his corduroy jacket and said, "It...

In troubled times such as these in which we now find ourselves, it is rewarding to reread the words of great individuals who offer comfort and hope. One of those greats is the economist Thomas Sowell. He has said and written so many undeniable truths that it is daunting to select a few that stand out. Nevertheless, I will try. "Ours may become the first civilization destroyed not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous ignorance they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial...

The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. .. When COVID-19 first came to our shores, it presented policymakers and elected officials with a crisis like nothing in living memory. In the year since, states have taken markedly different approaches to pandemic policy. Some, like New York, embraced sweeping government lockdowns and top-down mandates while others like Florida and South Dakota took a more humble, hands-off government approach, trusting individuals to make the best decisions for themselves. The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. First, we saw...

Many Americans today continue to talk past each other in their discussions of justice. Progressives often see conservatives as insensitive and lacking compassion for the poor and oppressed. They march and protest in the streets for justice and view conservatives’ lack of protest as signs of their racism and privilege. Meanwhile, many conservatives cannot understand how progressives can see their tactics as just. They watch the protesters loot and burn cities and gape at the lawlessness of these social “justice” warriors. The reason why there can be no actual conversation between these groups is that they do not share the...