Bøger i Encounter Broadsides serien

How bad is the problem of media bias? The answer can be summed up in a few words: President Donald J. Trump. Whether you love him or hate him, there's no question that Trump gained a huge amount of support for his willingness to criticize the media in harsh and unsparing terms. The media seems baffled by the fact that it's lost the trust of the American people. It has responded by being extraordinarily defensive and doubling down on histrionic attacks. However, the American system has always depended on a strong and trusted media to hold those in power accountable. Journalist Mollie Hemingway looks at the impressive list of media failure that led us to this unique moment and asks, Is it possible for the media to recover its credibility before it's too late?

One of the grim comedies of the twentieth century was the fate of miserable victims of communist regimes who climbed walls, swam rivers, dodged bullets, and found other desperate ways to achieve liberty in the West at the same time as intellectuals in the West sentimentally proclaimed that these very regimes were the wave of the future. A similar tragicomedy is being played out in our century: as the victims of despotism and backwardness from third world nations pour into Western states, the same ivory tower intellectuals assert that Western life is a nightmare of inequality and oppression.In The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, Kenneth Minogue explores the intelligentsia's love affair with social perfection and reveals how that idealistic dream is destroying exactly what has made the inventive Western world irresistible to the peoples of foreign lands. The Servile Mind looks at how Western morality has evolved into mere "politico-moral? posturing about admired ethical causes-from solving world poverty and creating peace to curing climate change. Today, merely making the correct noises and parading one's essential decency by having the correct opinions has became a substitute for individual moral actions.Instead, Minogue posits, we ask that our government carry the burden of solving our social-and especially moral-problems for us. The sad and frightening irony is that as we allow the state to determine our moral order and inner convictions, the more we need to be told how to behave and what to think.

These are the questions we should be asking to prevent runaway scientism with its utopian longings from reshaping humankind in the image of our own choosing. Kass believes that technology has done and will continue to do wonders for our health and longevity and that we have much to be thankful for.

What would happen if the maniacal tyranny in Pyongyang took over the vibrant democracy of South Korea? Today, there is a real possibility that the destitute North Korean regime will soon dominate its thriving southern neighbor, with help from the government in Seoul itself.More than any South Korean president before him, Moon Jae-in is intent on achieving Korean union, even if it's done on Pyongyang's terms. To that end, he has been making South Korea compatible with the totalitarian North, and distinctly less free. He is also removing defenses to infiltration and invasion and taking steps to end his country's only real guarantee of security, the alliance with the United States. If Moon's policy results in handing Kim Jong Un a "final victory" and South Korea falls to despotism, America will lose the anchor of its western defense perimeter, and the free world will be at risk.

Examines the intellectual and spiritual traditions of our belief in individual liberty, from the Judeo Christian origins through Enlightenment philosophy.

The United Nations is failing abysmally, and dangerously, in its mission. Founded in 1945 as a vehicle to avert war and promote human dignity and freedom, the U.N. has instead become a self-serving and ever-expanding haven of privilege for the world's worst regimes, rife with bigotry, fraud, abuse, and corruption, both financial and moral. Yet the American foreign policy community treats it as taboo to speak seriously about sidelining, supplanting, or leaving the U.N. The usual argument is that the U.N. may be imperfect, but it's all we've got.In this Broadside, Claudia Rosett explains why the U.N.'s basic design means it cannot really be reformed and why it is becoming ever more urgent to seek alternatives. Rosett argues that it's time to break the taboo, and to bring fully into America's foreign policy debates the question of how to dispense with the U.N. altogether.

"There is little dispute that the Internet should continue as an open platform,? notes the Federal Communications Commission. Yet in a curious twist of logic, the FCC has moved to upend the rules yielding that outcome, imposing "network neutrality? regulations on broadband-access providers. The new mandates purport to prevent Internet "gatekeepers? by prohibiting networks from favoring certain applications.In this comprehensive Broadside, Thomas W. Hazlett explains the faulty economic logic behind the FCC's regulations. The "open Internet?-thriving without such mandates-allows consumers, investors, and entrepreneurs to choose the best platforms and products, testing rival business models. Networks are actively (and efficiently) involved in managing traffic and promoting popular applications, making the entire ecosystem more valuable. This is a spontaneous market process, not a planned structure, and the commission's restrictions threaten to stifle innovation and economic growth.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has launched an international campaign to achieve recognition by the United Nations for an independent Palestinian state. Abbas and his international supporters claim that only Israel (with the United States) stands in the way of this act of historical justice, which would finally bring about peace in the Middle East.In this eye-opening Broadside, Sol Stern debunks the Palestinians’ claim and shows that Abbas has been lying about the origins and history of the conflict. Palestinian leaders have rejected partition plans that would have given them much more land for their independent state than the Jews were offered for theirs. Rather than being the innocent victims of a “dispossession” at the hands of the Israelis, the Palestinians rejected reasonable compromises and instead pursued their aim of getting rid of the only Jewish state in the world.

Government-workers unions have been political juggernauts in the U.S. since the unseen collective-bargaining-rights revolution of the 1960s and '70s. These unions are different and more powerful than those that battle owners and managers in the private sector. To advance their interests, unions in the public sector have created cartels with their political allies, mostly in the Democratic Party, to the exclusion of the taxpaying public.In this Broadside, Daniel DiSalvo shows us how this government takeover happened and tells us what can be done to protect the public interest. The fiscal consequences have already proven dire and threaten the long-term power and prestige of the United States on the world stage.

The relationship between environmental regulation and economic growth has gone from dysfunctional to disastrous under the leadership of Barack Obama's EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. Jackson's EPA has assumed broad new powers and promulgated sweeping new regulations unlike anything America has seen since the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were signed into law 40 years ago. While much of the public has focused on the EPA's plans to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions, the agency's power grab extends into far more areas of society and the economy than fossil-fuel use alone.In this Broadside, Rich Trzupek explains why Obama's EPA is different and more dangerous than any other since the agency was created. While the tentacles of this EPA are silently creeping into our lives, Lisa Jackson smilingly assures us that everything the EPA does generates revenue - instead of costing industry billions of dollars and America hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Barack Obama has made it clear that he thinks the world would be a better and more peaceful place if the United States were too weak to affect the course of events. Obama, along with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has slashed missile defense, dramatically reduced investment in future military technologies, and broken promises to our allies. In addition, Obama is transforming our military into a politically correct force that no one will want to join.In this incisive Broadside, Jed Babbin analyzes Obama's military strategy and shows how he has pursued a consistent course of action that defines him and his overriding objective - to reduce America from a superpower to a paper tiger. These are not the policies of a president who wants America to be strong, safe, and secure. But they are the policies that define Barack Obama.ENCOUNTER BROADSIDES: a new series of critical pamphlets from Encounter Books. Uniting an 18th-century sense of political urgency and rhetorical wit (think The Federalist Papers, Common Sense) with 21st-century technology and channels of distribution, Encounter Broadsides offer indispensable ammunition for intelligent debate on the critical issues of our time. Written with passion by some of our most authoritative authors, Encounter Broadsides make the case for liberty and the institutions of democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment. Read them in a sitting and come away knowing the best we can hope for and the worst we must fear.