Uncommon Knowledge

June 16, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Andrew Breitbart

My friend Andrew Breitbart is the consequential fellow who stepped out from behind his work for the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post to establish his own online empire under the rubric Big: Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism, and Big Peace. He is smart, he is funny, he has the soul of a warrior, and he has quickly made himself a pillar of the conservative movement. He is therefore »
June 2, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Michael Chertoff

Michael Chertoff served in the Bush administration as the second Secretary of Homeland Security, the position in which he succeeded Tom Ridge in Bush’s second term. He is the author of Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years, published in 2009 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He sat for an interview with Peter Robinson on May 17, a little more than two weeks after the killing of Osama bin »
May 18, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Thomas Sowell

Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell is a remarkable man who has produced a distinguished body of work over a long career. His achievements should be recognized in some appropriate way, perhaps with a Medal of Freedom to go with the National Humanities Medal that President Bush awarded him in 2002 (his friend Clarence Thomas picked it up for him). When he turned 75 a few years ago, Sowell observed his »
May 11, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Michael Totten

Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Michael Totten. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next Wednesday. In the meantime, here is the interview with Totten, once more once, after a brief introduction. Michael J. Totten is the independent foreign correspondent who has established his reputation on the Internet. In 2006 he was named Blogger »
April 27, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Andrew Ferguson

Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Andrew Ferguson. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Ferguson, once more once, after a brief introduction. Andrew Ferguson is the native Illinoisan, conservative luminary, Weekly Standard senior editor, and author of Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America. »
April 6, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Donald Rumsfeld

In his introduction of Donald Rumsfeld at his appearance before the Wednesday Morning Club, David Horowitz saluted him as “a man whose service to our nation and the cause of freedom began nearly 60 years ago.” He continued: In 1954, Donald Rumsfeld, newly graduated from Princeton, joined the Navy as an aviator. On leaving active service three years later, he became a Congressional staffer and in 1962, won a seat »
April 2, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Mitch Daniels

Two and a half weeks ago we posted Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge interview with Governor Mitch Daniels. The following week Uncommon Knowledge presented a special edition with Victor Davis Hanson and Peter Berkowtiz, thus interrupting our usual schedule for a replay of the Daniels interview. Given our format, the Daniels interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next Wednesday. In the »
March 23, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge (Special Edition)

Peter Robinson convened a panel consisting of Victor Davis Hanson and Peter Berkowitz — Hoover Institution fellows both — to discuss recent events in the Middle East. Berkowitz is a frequent visitor to Israel and Hanson had a ruptured appendix removed in a nightmarish emergency procedure a while back on his bizarre Libyan holiday. They are both learned analysts of events in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the discussion was held »
March 16, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Mitch Daniels

MItch Daniels is of course the phenomenally successful Indiana governor who is frequently mentioned as a possible Republican presidential candidate. Andrew Ferguson profiled Governor Daniels in the Weekly Standard article “Ride along with Mitch,” discussed in the interview in connection with Governor Daniels’s advocacy of a “truce” on social issues in order for us to confront the new “Red menace” of deficits and debt. “If you don’t believe that the »
March 2, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Bruce Thornton

Bruce Thornton is a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America, forthcoming on March 15, as well as eight previous books including Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (with Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath) and Greek Ways: How the »
February 16, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with William Voegeli

Why are welfare state liberals like our president and his congressional allies perpetually seeking to appropriate the income and manage the lives of productive citizens? Why can’t they tell us when they will have taken all that it is right to take, so we can relax, secure in the enjoyment of our property? In a series of essays written for the Claremont Review of Books, CRB contributing editor William Voegeli »
February 2, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Stanley Kurtz

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a regular contributor to NRO’s Corner, and the author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism. The deeply researched book argues that the key to understanding Obama’s politics is Obama’s background as a college socialist and a community organizer. Paul Mirengoff wrote about the book several times, including here, here, and here. Summarizing »
January 26, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Epstein and Yoo

Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Professors Richard Epstein and John Yoo. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have a new edition of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Professors Epstein and Yoo, once more once, after a brief introduction. As Congress convened during the first week of January, Peter Robinson sat down with »
January 13, 2011 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Thomas Sowell

Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Thomas Sowell. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Thomas Sowell, once more once, after a brief introduction. Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell is a remarkable man who has produced a distinguished body of work over a long career. »
December 31, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Milton Friedman

Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s interview with Milton Friedman. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We’ll have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Milton Friedman, once more once, after a brief introduction. To celebrate the holidays, Uncommon Knowledge brings us a blast from the past. Host Peter Robinson rides in on a motorcycle »
December 11, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Matt Ridley

Paul Ehrlich is the Stanford University scientist and doomsayer who predicted early in the late 1960′s that “the population bomb” would soon result in global starvation. Those of us who were around at the time will remember Ehrlich’s ubiquitous 1968 book The Population Bomb. Ehrlich argued that unless we adopted drastic measures our future was grim. A famine of biblical proportions was to occur by 1975. In 1980 Ehrlich famously »
November 10, 2010 — Scott Johnson

Uncommon Knowledge with Gary Becker

Gary Becker is one of the most prominent and lucid economists in the United States. In the course of a long and distinguished career teaching at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize for Economics. Among his many books are A Treatise on the Family, Accounting for Tastes, The Economics of Life (with Guity Nashat Becker), Social Economics: »