If it's Thursday, it must be Charles Town (Not Charleston!), WV. . .
Life on the road-- and a couple of other books you should be reading
It’s been a fun, but somewhat grueling last several weeks— That’s the best excuse I’ve got for being a bit tardy in posting here. I’ll try to do better going forward!
I’m not even going to try to highlight all of the book-related media I’ve done since I last checked in with everyone. The good news is that most of it is highlighted on my X/Twitter feed which hopefully most of you have already subscribed to. But it’s been great to talk to people from so many different perspectives about this important issue.
I just returned home to Montana from several days on the road. I had first headed out to beautiful Coeur D’Alene Idaho (a five hour drive from my home, but a beautiful one— people from out of the area often don’t understand that long drives out here can be fun— it’s not like you’re stuck in traffic for five hours on the New Jersey Turnpike) CDA, besides having a stunning setting, is one of the growing bastions of the American right and it was great to engage to engage with a number of current and emerging leaders of the Idaho GOP and the conservative movement.
From there it was on to Moscow, Idaho, where I discussed my book with prominent pastor Doug Wilson (whose long and varied career includes basically founding the modern Classical Christian schooling movement and engaging in a long series of public debates with on Christianity vs. Atheism with the late Christopher Hitchens that were later made into a book and a movie.) I spent the day taping a number of shows with Wilson and his colleagues at Canon Press, And then, after a luxurious night in the Spokane, WA airport Ramada, it was on to DC (or more precisely, Charles Town, WV about a 90 minute drive away) to tape with Tim Pool for my first time on the massively popular Timcast platform.
Pool has built a small, free-wheeling, media empire out of his place in the farthest DC exurbs and it’s was fun to get to join the circus for a day.
After a couple hours of taping where we discussed a wide variety of issues around my book, I actually managed to come out ahead in a low-stakes Texas Hold’em poker game with Tim, another guest, and various folks in his entourage— though Tim was a far more serious and accomplished player than I am and was the big winner of the group.
Earlier in the month, I flew out to Texas where I taped with Allie Beth Stuckey at the Blaze, among others. Later this month I’ll be teaching Claremont’s newest class of Publius Fellows (a great program to apply for if you are young, conservative, and interested in ideas!) on the California Coast.
In July I’ll be speaking at NatCon 4 in Washington DC and also to the DC Young Republicans. I’ll also be doing a couple of private talks to groups about which I can’t divulge the specifics, but suffice it to say, the message is getting out in some *very* influential circles in DC, which was half of the purpose for writing it (the other half, of course, being to get the message out to everyday Americans!).
Incidentally, I’d encourage everyone, especially if you’re in the DC Area, to attend NatCon, which is one of the top conservative events of the year— one that has substance and not just flash.
In other news, below are a few thoughts on a couple books I’ve recently read and that I’d recommend.
Auron MacIntyre’s The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies came out a couple of weeks after my book. is well worth checking out. MacIntyre’s analysis is very sophisticated for a book aimed at a popular audience and uses writings from political philosophers such as De Maistre, Jouvenel, and Schmitt to explain the nature of our current regime, and how it has increasingly pushed tyrannical levels of state control.under the guise of democracy. Auron also why it is, despite all of it’s current power and oppressiveness, is ultimately doomed to fail. He’s is a very clear writer and thinker and has done a real service in introducing these thinkers (and many others) to a popular audience. It’s a serious book written about a serious subject in a clear style that makes complicated ideas tractable.
Additionally I’d recommend (with a huge caveat) A Mighty and Irresistible Tide. It’s a book about U.S. immigration policy between 1924 and 1965 by Jia Lynn Yang, the national editor for the New York Times. This is a journey that takes us from the time of the strictest immigration policy ever re-enacted in the U.S. (The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924) to the immigration bill that fundamentally transformed the U.S. (The Hart-Celler bill of 1965.)
The YUGE caveat to my recommendation is that Yang is obviously a lib and (as she acknowledges) a direct beneficiary of Hart-Celler, and the book strongly reflects her biases. That having been said, she does a mostly credible job of drawing a human portrait of the adversaries of the Hart-Celler bill and why they were able to stymie the so-called reformers so successfully for so long. And she doesn’t make any bones about what a dramatic departure Hart-Celler was from our earlier immigration history.
She also shows (albeit unintentionally) just how subversive the supporters of liberalized immigration were in pushing their agenda in the teeth of continual public opposition, and how both supporters and many opponents were ultimately surprised by the results (though, to her credit she notes that some skeptics were aware that immigration would fundamentally transform America and strongly opposed the bill for that reason.)
Even for someone like me, who was pretty familiar with the maneuverings around immigration in policy the mid-20th century, you can learn a lot as long from this book as you go in with a very skeptical eye toward the author’s overall political project.
The review of Yang's book in the Journal of Arizona History is like a parody of the Hysterical Lib School of History... No doubt an accurate representation of how this subject is addressed in any university courses that teach it
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/805163