Something is wrong with American journalism. Long before “fake news” became the calling card of the right, Americans had lost faith in their news media. But lately the feeling that something is off has become impossible to ignore. That’s because mainstream news is not liberal anymore; it’s woke. Today’s newsrooms are propagating radical ideas that were fringe as recently as a decade ago, including anti-racism, intersectionality, open borders, and critical race theory. How did this come to be?
The George Floyd protests that have precipitated great changes throughout American society were not spontaneous events. Americans did not suddenly rise up in righteous anger, take to the streets, and demand not just that police departments be defunded but that all the structures, institutions, and systems of the United States—all supposedly racist—be overhauled. The 12,000 or so demonstrations and 633 related riots that followed Floyd’s death took organizational muscle. The movement’s grip on institutions from the classroom to the ballpark required ideological commitment. That muscle and commitment were provided by the various Black Lives Matter organizations.
The charges of systemic racism and White privilege that are tearing the country apart float free of reality. Two known truths, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be acknowledged and incorporated into the ways we approach public policy: American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians have different rates of violent crime and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. These two truths drive the problems in policing, education, and the workplace that are now ascribed to systemic racism. Facing Reality lays out the evidence clinically and in detail, without apologies or animus.
The 1776 Report is the official report of The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. Submitted to the President and released as a public document on January 18, 2021, the report explains the core principles of the American founding and how they have shaped American history, considers the leading challenges to these principles at home and abroad, and calls on all Americans to “restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.”
The 1776 Report is the official report of The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. Submitted to the President and released as a public document on January 18, 2021, the report explains the core principles of the American founding and how they have shaped American history, considers the leading challenges to these principles at home and abroad, and calls on all Americans to “restore our national unity by rekindling a brave and honest love for our country and by raising new generations of citizens who not only know the self-evident truths of our founding, but act worthy of them.”
For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society.
When and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance.
The real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration. The media–Democrat “collusion narrative,” which paints Donald Trump as cat’s paw of Russia, is a studiously crafted illusion.
The Democratic Party has changed beyond recognition. Once the party of anti-communism and tax-cutting under President Kennedy, it is now dominated by a surging socialist movement and led by a presidential candidate who vows to “transform” America.
The American worker is in crisis. Wages have stagnated for more than a generation. Reliance on welfare programs has surged. Life expectancy is falling as substance abuse and obesity rates climb.
These woes are not the inevitable result of irresistible global and technological forces. They are the direct consequence of a decades-long economic consensus that prioritized increasing consumption—regardless of the costs to American workers, their families, and their communities.
The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so.
Until yesterday, no society had seen marriage as anything other than a conjugal partnership: a male-female union. What Is Marriage? identifies and defends the reasons for this historic consensus and shows why redefining civil marriage is unnecessary, unreasonable, and contrary to the common good.
A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis.
The United States’ approach to China since the Communist regime in Beijing began the period of reform and opening in the 1980s was based on a promise that trade and engagement with China would result in a peaceful, democratic state. Forty years later, the hope of producing a benign People’s Republic of China utterly failed.
The real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.