Books
December 12, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Bari Weiss interviewed UK Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch at length in the hour-plus video below. The video is posted here at the Free Press with an introduction by Bari. I have also posted the video below. At about 12:00, Bari asks Badenoch if she read any books that influenced her intellectual evolution. Good question! If Thomas Sowell came to mind, as it did to mine, you are correct. Badenoch
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November 21, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I have four propositions with which many readers disagree. First, William Barr was an outstanding Attorney General of the United States in the first Trump administration. Second, if it weren’t for Barr, the Mueller investigation would still be going strong persecuting innocent citizens. We would be entertaining proposals to convert it into a permanent commission. Third, I agree entirely with Barr’s critique of President Trump’s endgame on January 6. I
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November 15, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll reports OUR GIRLS ARE CRAZY! She writes: For several years now various confessional books, psychologists, sociologists, and observers of the passing scene have warned us that our young women – especially those who lean left — have become, not to put too fine a point on it, bat guano crazy. But I didn’t really believe it. As a “somewhat high-strung” person of the female persuasion, whose husband complains
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November 11, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Robert Gover wrote the cult classic One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding. It may have been cutting-edge in 1961, when it was published, but not for long. Indeed, Hunter Biden’s misadventures have taken reality far beyond Gover’s satire. However, I have found Gover’s title an irresistible source of headlines for comments on the news. Here we go again. The Harris presidential campaign reportedly raised and spent $1,000,000,000 in the course of its
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October 9, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Below Steve takes up the incredible story of the roiling of CBS News by a morning host’s treatment of Ta-Nehisi Coates as an adult writer rather than the author of holy writ. Coates was peddling his new book attacking the existence of Israel. Having read his old book — Between the World and Me, published in 2015 and celebrated as a masterpiece wherever the left holds sway — I was
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September 24, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Republicans held a narrow majority in the Minnesota state senate after the 2018 elections that produced Tim Walz as governor. The Republican majority was reduced to one vote after the 2020 elections. Paul Gazelka served as the senate majority leader for five years including the entirety of Walz’s first term. Mr. Gazelka did an excellent job holding his caucus together and keeping Walz in check — until Walz seized on
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September 17, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I posted this column by Professor Sean McMeekin over the weekend. Now that it has rotated off our home page, I am giving it one more spin in case you missed it. Sean McMeekin is Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College and the author of essential books including The Red Millionaire: Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940 (2004), The Russian Revolution: A New History
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September 14, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Sean McMeekin is Francis Flournoy Professor of European History at Bard College and the author of essential books including The Red Millionaire: Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940 (2004), The Russian Revolution: A New History (2017), and Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II (2021). His new book is To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, just published by Basic
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September 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The film Truth (2015) is playing right now on Showtime/Paramount+. If you know anything about the “truth,” so to speak, it is an utterly infuriating film. I want to take the liberty of repeating points about the film that I have made here previously. Despite the film’s commercial failure, I think the lies of Truth matter. They are intended to rewrite the historical record and to vindicate an audacious journalistic
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August 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The positively Orwellian invocations of “freedom” at the Democratic National Convention by authoritarian “equitycrats” like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sent me to my library to dust off James Burnham’s classic Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Looks like I’m going to end up re-reading the whole thing, because it has lost none of its potency in the 60 years since it was
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August 7, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In case you missed your chance Monday to order my new collection of book reviews and cultural commentary After Further Review, there’s still time! But today I want to make another book announcement. Next month, Bombardier Books will be publishing Against the Corporate Media: Forty-Two Ways the Press Hates You, edited by our friend Michael Walsh. I am one of the 42 contributors, with a chapter on “The Russia Hoax
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August 5, 2024 — Steven Hayward
It is long past time for us to have our own book imprint of sorts, in my case because I have many hundreds of articles, reviews, and blog posts that are suitable for a series of essay collections. So herewith today I am launching “Power Line Books” on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, with the first of several collections I am assembling over the summer in my free time going
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July 17, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Both CNN and the Washington Post reported yesterday that the Iranian regime is plotting to kill President Trump. Jewish World Review has posted the Washington Post story in accessible form here. Intelligence concerning the plot derives from a human source and is apparently unrelated to the attempted assassination of Trump over the weekend. NRO’s Jimmy Quinn quotes Rich Goldberg’s tweet on the rationale for such an operation: “Donald Trump is
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July 3, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
With the real Joe Biden on full display, and establishment media swearing he’s “sharp as a tack,” the Delaware Democrat has made himself fair game. Biden observers might contrast people still exceptionally sharp well into their emeritus years. Consider, for example, the great Thomas Sowell. He wrote Charter Schools and Their Enemies in 2020, the same year he turned 90. In his eighties, Sowell wrote Discrimination and Disparities; Wealth, Poverty
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June 23, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Victor Davis Hanson is out talking about The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Listening to his interview on the current Ricochet podcast with Rob Long and Steve Hayward, I learn that Victor has been working his way through a second round of Covid. He contracted this one while leading 160 travelers on a tour to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Victor, take care
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June 19, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Gerald Eskenazi covered sports for the New York Times for almost 50 years. Along the way he wrote biographies of Bill Veeck and Leo Durocher as well as as-told-to autobiographies of Carl Yastrzemski and Phil Esposito, among others. From his perch at the Times Eskenazi covered just about every noteworthy sports story of the 50 years preceding his retirement from the Times. Following his retirement Eskenazi wrote his very own
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June 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Students of ancient history may recall the disinformation that greeted the revelations of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. The New York Post confirmed and reported them, yet they were routinely dismissed on patently fraudulent grounds. The government has now introduced the laptop as evidence in Hunter Biden’s gun trial and the FBI has vouched for its authenticity. What is to be said? KanekoaTheGreat comments
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