Baltimore’s 2015 ended as its bloodiest and deadliest year — on a per-capita basis. In 2014, Detroit’s police chief called upon law-abiding citizens to take arms against its burgeoning, violent, criminal subculture. Unfortunately, these cities aren’t anomalies. Year after year, a seemingly unshakable reality of violence plagues black communities nationwide. In fact, since 1980, blacks have routinely accounted for almost half of America’s annual homicide victims, and more than half of the perpetrators — all while being a minor thirteen percent of the national populace. Yet, a certain black-based industry — which specializes in nurturing comfortable lies while burying uncomfortable truths — propagates a notion that “racism” is the foremost issue facing black Americans, and white cops are blood-thirsty enforcers. Moreover, this cunning, race-peddling entity knows that it's easier to lie to blacks than to convince blacks that they've been lied to. Thus, black "lies" are good for business... black "lives" are good for nothing (except exploitation). And presently, business is booming.

    Today, sadly, this ideal of the university is being quietly betrayed from within. Universities still set themselves apart from American society, but now they do so by enforcing their own politically correct worldview through censorship, double standards and a judicial system without due process. Faculty and students who threaten the prevailing norms may be forced to undergo "thought reform."In a surreptitious about-face, universities have become the enemy of a free society, and the time has come to hold these institutions to account.The Shadow University is a stinging indictment of the covert system of justice on college campuses, exposing the widespread reliance of n kangaroo courts and arbitrary punishment to coerce students and faculty into conformity. Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, staunch civil libertarians and active defenders of free inquiry on campus, lay bare the totalitarian mindset that undergirds speech codes, conduct codes, and "campus life" bureaucracies, through which a cadre of deans and counselors indoctrinate students and faculty in an ideology that favors group rights over individual rights, sacrificing free speech and academic freedom to spare the sensitivities of currently favored groups.From Maine to California, at public and private universities alike, liberty and fairness are the first casualties as teachers and students find themselves in the dock, presumed guilty until proven innocent and often forbidden to cross-examine their accusers. Kors and Silverglate introduce us to many of those who have firsthand experience of The Shadow University, including:The student at the center of the 1993 "Water Buffalo" case at the University of Pennsylvania who was brought up on charges of racial harassment after calling a group of rowdy students "water buffalo" -- even though the terms has no racial connotations.The Catholic residence adviser who was fired for refusing, on the grounds of religious conscience, to wear a symbol of lesbian and gay causesThe professor who was investigated for sexual harassment when he disagreed with campus feminists about curriculum issuesThe student who was punished for laughing at a statement deemed offensive to others and who was ordered to undergo "sensitivity training" as a result.The Shadow University unmasks a chilling reality for parent who entrust their sons and daughters to the authority of such institutions, for thinking people who recognize that vigorous debate is the only sure path to truth, and for all Americans who realize that when even one citizen is deprived of liberty, we are all diminished.

    First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.

    It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

    Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.

    Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, burgeoning trans-national elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war’s refugees, but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory – like Pandora’s Box – released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a central-European nihilism celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the New Nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service; they have sown (as Cardinal Bergoglio – now Pope Francis – once wrote of the Devil) “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny” – and all disguised as the search for truth.In The Devil's Pleasure Palace we will look at the ways Critical Theory took root in America and, once established and gestated, has affected nearly every aspect of American life and society – and what can be done to stop it.

    Published in early 1968, it both kindled and colored the May 1968 upheavals in France, which captured the attention of the world. Naming and defining the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than living in full, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and the replacement of God by the economy, the book argues that the countervailing impulses that exist within deep alienation - creativity, spontaneity, poetry present an authentic alternative to nilhilistic consumerism. This carefully edited new translation marks the first North American publication of this important work and includes a new preface by the author.

    Bethell writes in a compulsively readable style, and although he provides legitimate insight into the potential benefits of nuclear power and hormesis, some readers will be turned off when he attempts to disprove global warming and especially evolution. Throughout the book, Bethell makes questionable claims about subjects as varied as AIDS ("careful U.S. studies had already shown that at least a thousand sexual contacts are needed to achieve heterosexual transmission of the virus") and extinction ("It is not possible definitely to attribute any given extinction to human activity"), and backs up his arguments with references to the music magazine SPIN and thriller-writer Michael Crichton. Ironically, Bethell ends up proving his own premise by producing a highly politicized account of how liberal intellectuals and unchecked government agencies have created a "white-coated priesthood" whose lust for grant money has driven them to produce fearsome (but in Bethell's view, false) tales of ozone destruction and AIDS pandemics. In the end, this book is unlikely to sway readers who aren't already in Bethell's ideological camp, as any points worthy of discussion get lost in the glut of unsourced claims that populate this latest installment of "The Politically Incorrect Guide" series.

    

    Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse.Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison. But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem.What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities -- Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland -- had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them.San Fransicko reveals that the underlying problem isn't a lack of housing or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people, by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors. The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.

    Bob Altemeyer—author of Atheists and The Authoritarian Specter —gives a readable analysis of the nature of authoritarianism and its current impact on American politics.Full text available at theauthoritarians.org.

    P. Snow, in a now famous essay, wrote about the polarization of the "two cultures" -- literary intellectuals on the one hand, and scientists on the other. Although he hoped for the emergence of a "third culture" that would bridge the gap, it is only recently that science has changed the intellectual landscape. Brockman's thesis that science is emerging as the intellectual center of our society is brought to life vividly in The Third Culture, which weaves together the voices of some of today's most influential scientific figures, including: Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins on the implications of evolution Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, Daniel C. Dennett, and Roger Penrose on how the mind works Murray Gell-Mann and Stuart Kauffman on the new sciences of complexity The Third Culture is an honest picture of science in action. It is at once stimulating, challenging, and riveting.

    But the left and right can usually agree on one thing: that the Nordic system is impossible to replicate here at home. The US is too big, or too individualistic, or too puritan, or too . . . something. Whatever the reason, it's impossible, and we shouldn't bother to try.Enter George Lakey. A longtime activist and academic, Lakey has spent decades studying the economies of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland, and in Viking Economics, he reveals that Scandinavia's deep commitment to the welfare state is much more recent than we think. Not long ago, Scandinavia was a far more unequal place, with a much weaker commitment to the social welfare of its citizens. There's nothing inherently Scandinavian about greater equality . . . so why not try it here?Viking Economics is more fun and entertaining than any economics book you've ever read. And, very possibly, more convincing! As he ranges from twentieth-century Norwegian history to the details of Swedish childcare policies, Lakey never loses his sense of humor or his expansive, generous vision of a better, more equal future. By explaining that even Scandinavia's grandest experiments in social equality are rooted in recent political struggles, Lakey explains shows how we can do it, too—conventional wisdom be damned.From the Hardcover edition.

    Comprising a number of often secret but sometimes very influential religious groups in the West and in the Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and the development of the field of religious studies in the United States.In the nineteenth century, at a time when progressive intellectuals had lost faith in Christianity's ability to deliver religious and spiritual truth, the West discovered non-Western religious writings. From these beginnings grew Traditionalism, emerging from the occultist milieu of late nineteenth-century France, and fed by the widespread loss of faith in progress that followed the First World War. Working first in Paris and then in Cairo, the French writer Rene Guenon rejected modernity as a dark age, and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy - the central religious truths behind all the major world religions - largely on the basis of his reading of Hindu religious texts.A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to Guenon's call with attempts to put theory into practice. Some attempted without success to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalism finally provided the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and at the end of the twentieth century began to enter the debate in the Islamic world about the desirable relationship between Islam and modernity.

    It is now used frequently—and often incorrectly—by political leaders, editorial writers, and academics around the world. So what is soft power? Soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade. Whereas hard power—the ability to coerce—grows out of a country's military or economic might, soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies. Hard power remains crucial in a world of states trying to guard their independence and of non-state groups willing to turn to violence. It forms the core of the Bush administration's new national security strategy. But according to Nye, the neo-conservatives who advise the president are making a major miscalculation: They focus too heavily on using America's military power to force other nations to do our will, and they pay too little heed to our soft power. It is soft power that will help prevent terrorists from recruiting supporters from among the moderate majority. And it is soft power that will help us deal with critical global issues that require multilateral cooperation among states. That is why it is so essential that America better understands and applies our soft power. This book is our guide.