Brad Thor on The Apostle

"I'm a thriller writer, so my job is to give you... the best white-knuckle thrill ride I'm capable of....If I've done that, then I've succeeded as an author," says Brad Thor, author of The Apostle. "If you walk away from my books learning something more about the global war on terror [and] the perils facing our country...then I believe I've done my job as  an American." 

Harry Stein on I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

"Conservatives, by and large, are much more open-minded. Conservatives are truly open to diversity of viewpoints in a way that liberals are not," says Harry Stein, author of I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican: A Survival Guide for Conservatives Marooned Among the Angry, Smug, and Terminally Self-Righteous. "[Liberals] are simply never exposed to any other ideas."

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on Best of The American Spectator's Continuing Crisis

"Those stories about political correctness in the university...in the seventies and eighties were ironic because they were kind of out of the ordinary. I mean now they go on all the time," says R. Emmett Tyrrell, author of The Best of The American Spectator's Continuing Crisis: As Chronicled for Four Decades by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Nick Reding on Methland

"A minimum dose of crack [cocaine] will keep you high for about twenty minutes. A minimum dose of [methamphetamine] you're talking about at least twelve hours," says Nick Reding, author of Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.

Abigail Thernstrom on Voting Rights — and Wrongs

"These majority minority districts, these safe black and Hispanic districts, carefully gerrymandered to make sure that...no whites ever run in them, they put a ceiling on black political aspirations," says Abigail Thernstrom, author of Voting Rights — and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections.

Bruce Bawer on Surrender

"Soldiers are being sent [to Muslim lands] to give their lives to fight the same things that we are...appeasing at home without even a struggle and it's staggering, it's ironic, it's tragic," says Bruce Bawer, author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.

Vin Cannato on American Passage

"Many of the same legal issues that have to do with the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay have direct relation to what happened at Ellis Island," says Vincent J. Cannato, author of  American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.

Rick Brookhiser on Right Time, Right Place

"Both Bill [Buckley] and I had been operating under a misapprehension: I was looking for an idol, he was looking for an heir, meaning a kind of replica of himself. And of course when you look for such things you're not going to find them," says Richard Brookhiser, author of Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement.

Matthew B. Crawford on Shop Class as Soulcraft

"We've got this dichotomy of knowledge work versus manual work and I want to say that that's a bogus distinction, because in fact a lot of thinking goes on in the trades. So that despite the lower prestige that it gets, it could be a life worth choosing," says Matthew B Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

P.J. O'Rourke on Driving Like Crazy

"The car was a way for ordinary people to gain freedom and mobility...the like of which had really never been seen in the history of mankind," says P.J. O'Rourke, author of Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It's Supposed To Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn.

Patrick Allitt on The Conservatives

"After the Russian Revolution, when the threat of  Communism displacing capitalism came along, anybody who favored holding onto capitalism became a conservative because they were trying to protect a time-honored system...against a dangerous innovation," says Patrick Allitt, author of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.

David Pryce-Jones on The Closed Circle

"I personally think that President George W. Bush did a wonderful thing by overthrowing Saddam Hussein...because it has introduced democracy to a very important Arab country," says David Pryce-Jones, author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.

David Ignatius on The Increment

Speaking of the Central Intelligence Agency, David Ignatius, author of The Increment, says, "I want a service that is small, elite, and smart enough [to obtain vital intelligence]. I don't think we have [that] now. We have an over-broad mission and we have too many people, too many of whom are not of the highest caliber."

Tom Rob Smith on The Secret Speech

"[L]ots of people [who] say 'clearly Stalin was a monster, but maybe Lenin wasn't so bad' ignore the fact that the secret police evolved under Lenin. He was the person that created it. When you read his early writings, it's full of very violent language about how people who oppose their way of thinking...must be killed," observes Tom Rob Smith, author of The Secret Speech.

Peter Leeson on The Invisible Hook

"Precisely because the Somali pirates are greedy, they have a strong incentive to treat the captives [that they take]...well, which is why we have more than 800...hostages taken. A dead or injured hostage fetches no ransom," says Peter Leeson, author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.

Adrian Goldsworthy on How Rome Fell

"[Y]ou've got two and a half centuries...where the Romans are busy killing each other every few years [in civil wars]. It can only have done huge damage, and yet for some reason it never really gets a mention when anyone looks at the fall of the Roman empire," says Adrian Goldsworthy, author of How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.

Ezra Levant on Shakedown

"There is another way that America can be attacked by radical Islam. There's the hard jihad of bombs. But there's soft jihad of lawfare, using our own Western laws to pervert our liberties. You can see it coming...most of it's coming through the United Nations," says Ezra Levant, author of Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights.

Doug Stanton on Horse Soldiers

[T]his story is a bit like the Jetsons meet the Flintstones. These are the guys you don't see on the news...If you remember pictures of American servicemen on horseback riding in suglasses and scarves across their faces across the Afghan plain. They're US Special Forces...," says Doug Stanton, author of Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan.

Mark Helprin on Digital Barbarism

"There's a class of people...funded by mainly by corporations like Google and other Silicon Valley interests [who] want to abolish intellectual property. They say they don't, but they say...copyright is a tax, a monopoly, and a bar to creativity...[I]t's none of those things," says Mark Helprin, author of  Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto.

Andrew Klavan on The Last Thing I Remember

"Most of the people in this country believe in God...[M]ost of the people in this country appreciate this country and love it...I feel that the arts have become very hostile to the common man and  to common ideals that most of us have," says Andrew Klavan author of The Last Thing I Remember.

Maria Tatar on Enchanted Hunters

"Children are the great contrarians....[they] aren't going to just take messages and morals and internalize them...Often, when a tale does have a moral, they'll actually turn it around and embrace the vice that is being castigated in the story," says Maria Tatar, author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood.

David Bentley Hart on Atheist Delusions

"We used to produce better atheists, atheists who had a better arsenal of arguments to make," says David Bentley Hart, author of  Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. "But perhaps...it's sort of the slap-dash way in which they approach the topic that has made them so marketable."

Paul Rahe on Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift

"The crucial fact is for 96 years...we have had a gradual consolidation of power in the hands of the federal government. [T]he most important thing we need to do...is to restore federalism.," says Paul Rahe, author of Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect.

Jamie Glazov on United in Hate

"The left is attracted to totalitarianism because the left...wants to build a perfect planet...they want to build a utopia," says Jamie Glazov, author of United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Winston Groom on Vicksburg 1863

"Vicksburg, strategically,  was far more important [than Gettysburg] because it was the key to  the entire Mississippi River valley. Everything west of the Mississppi was lost [to the Confederacy]...and the Union got the use of the river," says Winston Groom, author of Vicksburg 1863. 

Angelo Codevilla on Advice to War Presidents

"The foreign policy of the United States has been carried out on the basis of a language that does not reflect reality...collective security...the community of nations: these things don't exist," says Angelo Codevilla, author of  Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft.

Dambisa Moyo on Dead Aid

"[Foreign aid] is harmful in the fundamental way that it does not allow governments to be held accountable, in a sense disenfranchising Africans," says Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.

Rich Lowry on Banquo's Ghosts

"There's obviously a very serious and substantive backdrop to this potboiler thriller, which is the real threat we face from Islamofacism...And the book grapples with very serious issues about how we respond to that threat. And it's a book that doesn't confuse the good guys with the bad guys," says Rich Lowry, co-author of Banquo's Ghosts.

Gene Wolfe on The Best of Gene Wolfe

"I am a conservative. I certainly read William F. Buckley, Jr. with delight…I think he mellowed a little too much at the end…He wasn't as sharp-edged as he really should have been. Perhaps the same thing will happen to me. But that doesn't mean that it's good," says Gene Wolfe, author of The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction.

William Julius Wilson on More Than Just Race

"A lot of people feel that when you talk about culture [in analyzing the behavior of inner-city blacks] you're placing the blame on individuals, rather than looking at other forces that determine social outcomes such as joblessness and poverty," says William Julius Wilson, author of More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.

William R. Forstchen on One Second After

"Electromagnetic pulse [is] the number one threat to the United States," say William R. Forstchen author of One Second After. "[EMP] is what happens when a nuclear weapon is detonated above the Earth's atmosphere...Our vast and elaborate infrastructure could be gone in one second."

Philip Freeman on St. Patrick of Ireland

Philip Freeman, author of St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, says, "[St. Patrick's Day] really is an American phenomenon. To a lesser extent Canada and Australia too, but it's really America that invented the modern St. Patrick's day and then exported it back to Ireland."

Roger Collins on Keepers of the Keys of Heaven

"Peter is seen traditionally as the first of the line of popes...but as an institution the bishopric doesn't actually come into being until about the year 150," says Roger Collins Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy.

James Mann on The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

James Mann, author of The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War,  says, "I think it's a mistake to always judge Reagan simply by his rhetoric."

Tom Zoellner on Uranium

'Terrorists getting a hold of raw uranium, about the only they could do would be to sell it somehow to a nation-state…The question that is I think more pertinent is 'Can they get a hold of what's called highly enriched uranium?'…It's difficult, but not impossible," says Tom Zoellner, author of Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World.

Michael Burleigh on Blood and Rage

"[Islamic terrorism] is clearly a product of frustration, anger, and rage," says Michael Burleigh, author of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism. "My abiding memory of this when I'm an old man will be of some kid…wagging his finger in my face from his suicide video saying, 'Don't mess with the Muslims.' '

Brad Gooch on Flannery

Speaking of the subject of his book, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, author Brad Gooch notes, "She was a Catholic in the South, which is a minority within a minority, and she tended not to have Catholic characters: she loved writing about these Southern Protestant, kind of Baptist preachers and healers, so there's almost an element of satire to [her writing]."

Ralph Benko on The Websters' Dictionary

"The web doesn't lean left.," says Ralph Benko, author of The Websters' Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World. "[A] handful of people on the left...discovered this before we did, got proficient at it...and very astutely used this great capacity to enroll...millions of people. We can do this too. In fact we can do this twice as well."

Roger Kimball on Tenured Radicals

"For at least ten years...students have been much more receptive to the message of [the book], namely that it's a bad thing when the curriculum gets politicized and when higher education is...turned over to ideologues rather than to scholars...[B]ut I haven't noticed any softening on the part of the faculty," says Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education.

Patrick J. Michaels on Climate of Extremes

"The most internally consist picture of global warming is one that it is a modest issue that is being exaggerated," say Patrick J. Michaels, author of Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know.

Michael J. Kline on The Baltimore Plot

Michael J. Kline, author of The Baltimore Plot: The First Conspiracy to Assassinate Abraham Lincoln, observes that, “Allan Pinkerton and others would later claim that [the Baltimore plot] was a much better planned assassination attempt than the one that actually succeeded in killing Lincoln in April 1865.”

Tony Blankley on American Grit

Tony Blankley, author of American Grit: What It Will Take to Survive and Win in the 21st Century, says, "I found in the last seven years that when I think about public policy issues, my first thought is always "Will it strengthen America or not?",  as opposed to thinking will it fit my pre-existing ideological theories about this or that or my own personal interests."

Roger L. Simon on Blacklisting Myself

Roger L. Simon, author of Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, on politics and work in Hollywood: "During the Bush era, Bush-bashing was like discussing the weather. And the assumption was that you hated Bush. And if it was otherwise, you wouldn't necessarily lose the job, but your chances went down 80%."

Neil deGrasse Tyson on The Pluto Files

Speaking of public outcry against the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet, Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet, says, "I'm pretty convinced we can blame it all on the dog." 

Jeff Benedict on Little Pink House

 "[T]he [city of New London's] argument [for eminent domain] was...if we build all these new things [we] will get more tax revenue and generate jobs," says Jeff Benedict, author of Little Pink House, "[T]hat's not a public use...[T]hat argument is a dangerous one and it's the one that went all the way to the Supreme Court."

George Friedman on The Next 100 Years

“[W]hen you take a look at the objective fundamental power of the United States it is simply staggering,” says George Friedman, author of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, “[T]ake a look at the manner in which the United States shrugs off things like loss in Vietnam, the collapse of the American position in Iran, then you start to have a sense...of just how powerful the United States is.”

Bernard Cornwell on Agincourt

“The more I researched the battle, the more I...discovered that probably most of the French casualties weren't killed by arrows at all,” says Bernard Cornwell, author of the novel Agincourt. “They were killed in some ghastly hand-to-hand fighting, using butchers’ weapons like pole-axes...it was a massacre, it was a slaughter.”

Robert J. Norrell on Up From History

“[Booker T. Washington] was conservative in his embrace of traditional family values…[and] he expected little from government…he assumes that the way for African Americans to rise in American life was through business,” says Robert J. Norrell, author of Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington.

T. Jefferson Parker on In the Shadow of the Master

"[Edgar Allan Poe] stands alone in a real odd and idiosyncratic way. He doesn't seem part of a tradition so much as the beginner of one, which critics claim that he is, and I guess I would agree with that," says T. Jefferson Parker, contributor of an essay to In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe.

Philip K. Howard on Life Without Lawyers

Philip K. Howard, author of Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law says, “We do need lawsuits and we do need litigation. But what's missing is any application of social norms about what's a reasonable lawsuit and what isn't.”

Robert H. Bork on A Time to Speak

Robert H. Bork, author of A Time to Speak: Selected Writings and Arguments, says originalism isn't the same thing as strict contructionism: "I don't know what strict constructionism is...I want reasonable contruction, which means a reasonable interpretation of the words and the history of the Constitution."

Kim Phillips-Fein on Invisible Hands

Speaking of the early leaders of the American right, Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan says, “It's about a network of business leaders...who were really devoted to undoing the New Deal...[they were] closely focused on free market ideas and criticizing economic liberalism, the idea of the welfare state and especially labor unions.”

Burt Solomon on FDR v. The Constitution

Discussing the possibility of a new effort to pack the Supreme Court, Burt Solomon, author of FDR v. The Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy observes, “If Obama and a Democratic Congress passed laws that...a conservative Supreme Court would strike down...you would have exactly the same situation that Roosevelt faced in 1937.”

Thomas Sowell on Applied Economics

Thomas Sowell, author of Applied Economics, 2nd Edition: Thinking Beyond Stage One doesn't think much of the $700 billion economic bailout: “It looked at first as a necessary evil, but as time goes on it looks more and more evil and less and less necessary…once that money has been created it becomes just another pot of the money that politcians can hand out hither and yon as they see fit.”

Ronald Hamowy on Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

Ronald Hamowy, Editor-In-Chief of The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, says of Russell Kirk, "[W]hat's he's trying to do is to reduce libertarianism to the most excessive views of the French Revolution which he does almost explicitly several times in his book on the conservative mind and that's not accurate." 

Kevin O'Brien on The Innocence of Father Brown: A Dramatic Reading

Kevin O'Brien, dramatic interpreter of The Innocence of Father Brown says, “I think in many ways Chesterston wrote Father Brown to be the anti-Holmes, because Sherlock Holmes was always on top of everything...whereas Father Brown is a lot more like Colombo.”

Mir Bahmanyar on SEALs: The US Navy's Elite Fighting Force

In the writing of SEALs: The US Navy's Elite Fighting Force, Mir Bahmanyar says, “There was great difficulty getting this book made…The key thing that we always had to look out for was not to reveal any tactics, training, or any sort of operational procedures that may be helpful to the enemy.”

Greg Forster on The Contested Public Square

“There’s…no longer a consensus about whether liberal democracy, the system we now have in the West, properly reflects, or should reflect, natural law concepts. In the 20th century there’s been this breathtaking disintegration of consensus among Christians about how to approach politics,” says Greg Forster, author of The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics.

Jack Sweetman on Leathernecks

Jack Sweetman, co-author of Leathernecks: An Illustrated History of the United States Marine Corps, says, "[T]he French Paras, the paratroopers, have a saying: If it's possible, it will be done. If it's impossible it will take longer. I think most Marines would endorse that oulook."

Mark Henrie on Arguing Conservatism: Four Decades of the Intercollegiate Review

"[C]onservatives often seek is to find a way to alleviate the losses [of tradition in the modern world] or to make good on the losses by searching for ways to reconnect to everything that was good in tradition," says Mark Henrie, editor of Arguing Conservatism.

Gregory L. Schneider on The Conservative Century

Speaking of whether American conservatism recieves enough credit for its role in winning the Cold War, Gregory L. Schneider, author of The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution, says, "I think it deserves more credit than many historians are willing to give it...I think too many historians are willing to say it was all Gorbachev."

Jonathan Brent on Inside the Stalin Archives

"We're learning exactly the degree of Stalin's own personal involvement in the masterminding and the execution of the terror itself...in fact [the terror] had been initiated and managed by Stalin for his own particular ends," says Jonathan Brent, author of Inside the Stalin Archives.

E.O. Wilson on Superorganism

According to E.O. Wilson, author of The Superorganism, “[Ants] proved that Marx was right. He just had the had the wrong species.”

Sal Paolantonio on How Football Explains America

“Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider himself, understood the importance of football on college campuses, because he saw that…American males…did not have the great outdoors and the pioneering spirit as much as they did in the late 1800s,” says Sal Paolantonio, author of How Football Explains America.

Ira Stoll on Samuel Adams: A Life

"It's pretty likely that if Samuel Adams hadn't existed at the time he did, America would have ended up more like Canada, sort of existing in the extended orbit of the British Empire for a much longer perood of time and only gradually drifing away," says Ira Stoll, author of Samuel Adams: A Life.

Peter Kreeft on Between Heaven and Hell

Speaking of C.S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley, the three men who carry on a dialogue in his re-issued classic, Peter Kreeft says, "These three guys seem to have represented the three most influential worldviews in the history of the world…Christianity…modern secular human[ism] with a thin Christian veneer and…ancient Hindu/Buddhist mysti[cism]."

H.W. Crocker III on The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War

The author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War, H.W. Crocker III,  speaking of secession, says, "When Texas seceded from Mexico, Lincoln made a speech in which he said that secession was a…great thing. He must have changed his tune when he was in the driver's seat."

Orson Scott Card on Ender in Exile

Speaking of America's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, Orson Scott Card, author of Ender in Exile, says “I think that we have fought a good war. Are fighting a good war. In the same way that World War Two was a good war. That it needed to be done.”

George C. Herring on From Colony to Superpower: U. S. Foreign Relations Since 1776

George C. Herring, author of From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776, tells John J. Miller, "If you look at big picture, I don't believe I exaggerate by calling [U.S. performance in foreign relations] a spectacular record of success."

Burton W. Folsom, Jr. on New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America

Burton W. Folsom, Jr., author of New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, tells John J. Miller, “Hardly anybody who writes on the New Deal mentions that Roosevelt rasied taxes to the top marginal rate in 1935 to 79%.”

John Fund on Stealing Elections

Commenting on the lack of zeal in prosecuting cases of voter fraud, John Fund, author of Stealing Elections, says, “There's an inevitable cry that any time you're preventing voter fraud, you're actually dealing in voter suppression, dealing in trying to reduce the minority vote, and that kind of attack often deters [DAs] from pursuing these cases.”

Joseph Pearce on Frankenstein

Joseph Pearce, editor of a new critical edition of Shelly's Frankenstein, notes, “Much of the criticism of Frankenstein over the last 40 or 50 years…has been looking at it from a…militant feminist perspective or in some sort of postmodern sense of it having nothing but a nihilistic, negative meaning. And that's clearly not what's going on in the novel.“

Anne Rice on Called Out of Darkness

Speaking of her Catholic faith, Anne Rice, author of Called Out of Darkness, says, “I broke with my faith in a tragic way, really, for me. It was a tragic and sad thing. And I was never happy until I went back thirty-eight years later.”

Yuval Levin on Imagining the Future

“What we find in Obama's language…is an attempt to use science to avoid the moral and the political questions,” says Yuval Levin, author of Imagining the Future. “To just say, ‘It's science so we can't touch it,’ and so to advance his preferred answer to the ethical question, not by winning the argument but by avoiding argument.”

Adam Kirsch on Benjamin Disraeli

"It's hard to draw a straight line from Disraeli conservatism to anything we would call conservative in American politics today...but in the broadest sense a conservatism that tries to unite the whole country behind a vison of traditional values, that's the Disraeli vision of conservatism," says Adam Kirsch, author of Benjamin Disraeli.

Vince Flynn on Extreme Measures

While optimistic about the outcome in Iraq, Vince Flynn, author of Extreme Measures, is less so regarding the prospects for the War on Terror's other front: “This is a country that has never enjoyed peace...Because we are so up on affording toloerance to these people, we're never going to see that one all the way through. It's gonna be tough to secure Afghanistan.”

Claire Berlinski on There Is No Alternative

Claire Berlinski, author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, says, “[H]er lower-middle class background inspired a degree of snobbery among her critics…that is absolutely shocking…who found her…‘middle-class gentility odious’, who said she literally made them sick.”

Walter E. Williams on Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism

“Socialism is a form of tyranny…we have to recognize…the only way the government can get one American citizen one dollar is to first through intimidation, threats and coercion confiscate that dollar from some other American,” says Walter E. Williams, author of Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism: Controversial Essays.

James M. McPherson on Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

“[Abraham Lincoln] stayed the course. He may have lost hope on more than one occasion, but he never lost his determination to prevail in the end,” says James McPherson, author of Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief.

Ron Robinson on Funding Fathers

“There’s a tendency oftentimes in the press to highlight the prominent gifts by liberals – George Soros is a good example – at the same time often key gifts to the conservative movement – those, for example, of Richard Scaife – are vilified,” says Ron Robinson, author of Funding Fathers:  The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement.

Chuck Norris on Black Belt Patriotism

“Do you know how many pages there are in the IRS tax code? 66,498 pages. Can you believe that? Who knows what’s inside of those 66,000 pages? Charlie Rangel doesn’t know, and he writes the tax code, for crying out loud,” says Chuck Norris, martial arts legend and author of Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America.

Stephen Moore on The End of Prosperity

"[T]he bigger problem with the Obama plan is that it raises taxes on the most productive people in the economy.…You can't raise taxes on small businesses and then expect to have small businesses create more jobs," says Stephen Moore, co-author of The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy—If We Let It Happen.

Brian Anderson on A Manifesto for Media Freedom

Speaking of the fairness doctrine, Brian Anderson, co-author of A Manifesto for Media Freedom, says  it's the idea that government can regulate speech for fairness and quality which is truly pernicious and which will result in a completely regulated press.

Benjamin Lockerd on Russell Kirk's Eliot and His Age

Discussing why scholars have yet to grasp Russell Kirk's understanding of T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Lockerd, editor of the new edition of Kirk's Eliot and His Age, tells John J. Miller that, "Eliot scandalized the intellectual word by becoming a Christian and this seemed at the time to be crazy to many of his friends. And it still seems crazy to some anti-religious scholars today."

Lynne Cheney on We The People

“When you put the flesh on the people who were there and you talk about the conflicts in which they were engaged,” says Lynne Cheney, author of We The People, “it’s then, I think, that kids begin to grasp how fascinating history can be.”

Stephen Schwartz on The Other Islam

“It’s extremely important for Muslims and for non-Muslims to find a way to approach an Islam that can function as a normal religion and serve the interests of the Muslim believers in being good believers and being participants in…God’s world,” Stephen Schwartz, author of The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony, tells John J. Miller.

Larry Schweikart on 48 Liberal Lies About American History

Larry Schweikart says the nastiest lie being spread by the left today (that 9/11 was an inside job) won’t be believed years from now. That Gorbachev, and not Reagan, ended the Cold War is another story, the author of 48 Liberal Lies About American History, tells John J. Miller.

Gary J. Bass on Freedom's Battle

Humanitarian intervention is "definitely not the first thing on a government's foreign policy agenda. The first thing a government's going to be worried about obviously is protecting it's own people. I think that that's a given," says Gary J. Bass, author of Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention.

Christopher Buckley on Supreme Courtship

Discussing the topic of his new novel, Supreme Courtship, in which a TV judge gets named to the Supreme Court, Christopher Buckley says, “I don’t think cameras should be inside any courtroom. I don’t think they should have been in the O.J. Simpson courtroom.”

Ward Connerly on Lessons from My Uncle James

Ward Connerly, author of Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character, worries that, "There is a correlation between individual character and the character of a nation, and I believe that our national character has eroded tremendously over the years largely because we have no sense of direction. There is no compass about character."

Daniel J. Flynn on A Conservative History of the American Left

In distinguishing between the “Cowboy Left” and the “Puritan Left”, Daniel J. Flynn, author of A Conservative History of the American Left, tells John J. Miller that,“‘Do what I say’ and ‘Do your own thing’, they’re both American ideas that we’ve seen over hundreds of years. And they’re both part of this American Left even if they offer something very different.”

Bernard Lewis on Islam: The Religion and the People

Bernard Lewis, author of Islam: The Religion and the People, tells John J. Miller, "I didn't think the invasion [of Iraq] was a mistake, but I think the way that it was conducted was a mistake."

Harry Turtledove on The Man With the Iron Heart

Harry Turtledove, speaking with John J. Miller, tells us that in his latest alternative history, The Man With the Iron Heart, Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most brutal SS commanders, survives an assassination attempt to lead  postwar German resistance to American and Soviet occupation.

Charles Murray on Real Education

Charles Murray, author of Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality, tells John J. Miller, "When it comes to education, we are phobic about saying that kids are different in their ability to learn the things that schools teach."

Dan Perrin on America's Health Care Crisis Solved

Dan Perrin, co-author with J. Patrick Rooney of America’s Health Care Crisis Solved, tells John J. Miller that today’s health-care crisis is one of affordability, and that his book “provides a series of solutions for specific problems that are contributing to this overall health-care inflation.”

Stephen Coonts on The Assassin

Stephen Coonts explains for John J. Miller that his new novel, The Assassin, “is really about the War on Terror, and  . . . the people behind the uneducated holy warriors who actually do the fighting.”

David Freddoso on The Case Against Barack Obama

David Freddoso, author of The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, says Barack Obama has worked hard to portray himself as reformer when he is, in fact, anything but.

Michael Novak on No One Sees God

John J. Miller speaks with Michael Novak, author of No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers. Novak tells Miller, “God is not just another piece of furniture in the universe; you’re not going to discover him with your eyes.”

Bruce Herschensohn on Above Empyrean

Bruce Herschensohn tells John J. Miller that he wrote Above Empyrean: A Novel of the Final Days of the War Against Islamist Terrorism “as an appeal — a plea that the politician and the voter takes this war as seriously as it is. Winning supersedes everything else.”

Tom Vanderbilt on Traffic

Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), tells John J. Miller that a key source of increased road congestion is prosperity. Simply, “increasing economic fortune . . . compels people to drive; and they can afford to drive.”

Alfred S. Regnery on Upstream

Alfred S. Regnery, author of Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism, tells John J. Miller that “Conservatives have always had an uphill fight. From the beginning of the movement there was always enormous opposition from the left, [and] there’s always been dissension within the movement.”  

Thomas F. Madden on Empires of Trust

Thomas F. Madden, in Empires of Trust: How Rome Built—and America Is Building—a New World, is coming from a much different angle than the “decline and fall” of America. He points out to John J. Miller that an “aversion to empire … is really what set the Romans, and I would argue the Americans, apart.”

Christopher Reich on Rules of Deception

Christopher Reich talks with John J. Miller about his latest thriller, Rules of Deception, which “centers around an American doctor named Jonathan Ransom, who spent his career working with Doctors Without Borders in some political hotspots overseas.” Scene 1: Ransom’s beautiful wife Emma falls into a crevice and is killed.

Andrew Klavan on Empire of Lies

Andrew Klavan, author of Empire of Lies, describes for John J. Miller his story of “a conservative Christian family man from the Midwest who is drawn back to the scenes of his very degraded past in New York by a search for a missing girl. As he searches for her he begins to believe that he [has] pulled the string of an enormous Islamofascist conspiracy …”

Alvin Felzenberg on The Leaders We Deserved

Alvin Felzenberg, author of The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game, tells John J. Miller that “the closer you get to the modern era the more debate you are going to have” about presidential performance. Who’s high on Felzenberg’s list? Washington, Lincoln, and … Ronald Reagan.

Mark Krikorian on The New Case Against Immigration

Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, emphasizes for John J. Miller how civilization has changed such that “large-scale immigration of any kind is incompatible with the goals and characteristics of a modern society.”

Jim Noles on A Pocket Full of History

Jim Noles, author of A Pocketful of History: Four Hundred Years of America—One State Quarter at a Time, tells John J. Miller how the new state quarter program has not only “been great from the coin-collecting standpoint,” but also “from the revenue-generating standpoint.”

Brad Thor on The Last Patriot

Brad Thor, author of The Last Patriot, describes for John J. Miller how his novel is based on the idea of bringing “back America’s war with Islam that was conducted under Thomas Jefferson and [making] it relevant and interesting today.”

James Cuno on Who Owns Antiquity?

James Cuno, author of Who Owns Antiquity?, tells John J. Miller that ownership of antique objects is a big issue since “governments are making [ownership] claims for the advantage of their political positions, and not for the protection of the ancient heritage which happens to fall within the borders of their national jurisdictions.”

Ross Douthat on Grand New Party

Ross Douthat, coauthor with Reihan Salam of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, tells John J. Miller that the GOP “is a victim of its own success.”

John McWhorter on All About the Beat

John McWhorter, author of All about the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can’t Save Black America, says a lot of smart people actually believe rap and hip-hop are “going to teach young black America to rise up against the oppressor.” McWhorter explains for John J. Miller why this is nonsense.

Kathleen Parker on Save the Males

Kathleen Parker, author of Save the Males: Why Men Matter; Why Women Should Care, describes for John J. Miller a disturbing shift in Western society: “The culture has become decidedly anti-male. … We have turned against men and maledom in general.”

Mark Bowden on The Best Game Ever

Mark Bowden, author of The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL, sets the scene for John J. Miller: “Arguably one the best defenses in the league, the New York Giants in 1958, plays the best offense in the league, which was the Baltimore Colts, to a tie, and then they have to battle it out in overtime.”

Steven M. Gillon on The Pact

Steven M. Gillon, author of The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation, tells John J. Miller that “the pact” hinged on a single meeting where “these two dominant figures of the decade actually came together and talked about forming a partnership to push Social Security and Medicare reform through Congress.”

Ralph Reed on Dark Horse

Dark Horse: A Political Thriller is the first novel for Ralph Reed, the seasoned political insider. Reed explains the timely premise for John J. Miller: “It’s about the most bizarre presidential election in American history . . . I won’t ruin the story, but it’s a bitter fight — not unlike the one between Clinton and Obama.”

Peter Schweizer on Makers and Takers

Peter Schweizer’s Makers and Takers tallies the many ways in which conservatives are superior to liberals. For instance, Schweizer tells John J. Miller that “liberals are much more accepting of cheating on their taxes, are much more accepting of cheating on their spouse, [and are] much more likely to take money that doesn’t belong to [them].” The list goes on and on.

Jason Riley on Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders

Jason Riley, author of Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders, tells John J. Miller that many of the arguments for a stricter U.S. immigration policy are counterintuitive. For instance, Riley describes how the U.S. border “should be opened further as a means of reducing illegal immigration.”

Iain Murray on The Really Inconvenient Truths

Iain Murray, author of The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About — Because They Helped Cause Them, explains for John J. Miller why misinformation is so rife in the environmental movement: “they take a germ of truth and then blow it up out of all proportion; they take a mole hill and they make a mountain.”

Richard Brookhiser on George Washington on Leadership

Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor and author, most recently, of George Washington on Leadership, describes for John J. Miller the many qualities that made the father of our country such an exceptional leader. Among these was physical stature. Says Brookhiser, “When he does show up [before his troops], he makes an impressive figure. And that sort of momentary first impression is a very important thing.”

Mark Bauerlein on The Dumbest Generation

Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, describes his subject for John J. Miller: “They were on Google doing research from the time they were in fourth or fifth grade.” And why are they dumb? “They have all these [technological] privileges, and they use them on adolescent trivia.”

Michael Ward on Planet Narnia

Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, explains for John J. Miller how Lewis “structured the seven Chronicles of Narnia around the seven heavens of the Medieval cosmos. . . . When you look at the evidence, it really works out.”

Chip Mellor on The Dirty Dozen

William “Chip” Mellor, co-author with Robert Levy of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom, tells John J. Miller that the twelve cases chosen “each play a critical and tragic roll in effectively amending the Constitution, to take away what the Founding Fathers intended.”

James Mullaney on The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning

The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning, is the latest in a series of adventure novels by James Mullaney and Warren Murphy. Mullaney describes the setting for John J. Miller: “the twentieth highjacker from 9/11 . . . has somehow smuggled into his prison cell a weapon of great destructive power. . . . Following his escape from prison all hell breaks loose, and everybody is after this weapon.”

Mary Lefkowitz on History Lesson

In History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, classics professor Mary Lefkowitz describes how she spoke out against professors who taught that Greek culture “was stolen from Africa and that Jews were responsible for the slave trade.” She tells John J. Miller, “We really just need to try and talk about history as if it had some relationship to evidence.”

Michael Connelly on The Blue Religion

Michael Connelly, editor of The Blue Religion: New Stories about Cops, Criminals, and the Chase, explains for John J. Miller that “if you do not walk in the cop's shoes it’s hard to understand” what it’s like to be a cop. Thus, to be a cop is to be part of “a cult, a blue cult,” or a “blue religion.”

Arthur Herman on Gandhi & Churchill

Arthur Herman, author most recently of Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, tells John J. Miller that despite the great differences between his subjects, “they are really very much alike. And they really provide for us, I think, two very contrasting models of how democratic leadership can work in the modern age and the post-modern age.”

Ursula K. Le Guin on Lavinia

Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin describes for John J. Miller her latest effort, Lavinia. Who is Lavinia? In Virgil’s Aeneid, she is the second wife of Aeneas, and is barely mentioned. But Le Guin says, “Because Aeneas struck me as almost more of a novel character than an epic hero, a story began to go in my mind . . . What happens after the Aeneid ends, when they do get married?”

Arthur Brooks on Gross National Happiness

Arthur Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It, offers John J. Miller a revelation: “People who call themselves conservative or very conservative are about twice as likely to say they are very happy people, as are those who say they are liberal or very liberal.”

Richard A. Posner on How Judges Think

Richard A. Posner, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals, has a unique insight into the topic of his book, How Judges Think. He tells John J. Miller that thinking like a judge is a lot different than, say, thinking like an umpire, where it’s three strikes you’re out: “The problem with the courts, in especially the United States, is that the rules are often extremely fuzzy.”

Andrew C. McCarthy on Willful Blindness

Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO regular and author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, tells John J. Miller that “the theory of the book is that the war actually started with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. . . . Everything we’ve been arguing about from 9/11 forward really is a repetition . . . of the same arguments we were having in the wake of that [earlier] event.”

Steve Teles on The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement

Steven M. Teles, author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, tells John J. Miller that “the conservative legal movement was a response to the liberal legal movement — or what I call in the book the liberal legal network . . . that was in large part created in the end of the ’60s and the beginning of the ’70s.”

William Safire on Safire’s Political Dictionary

New York Times columnist William Safire has completed his first update of Safire’s Political Dictionary in decades. The latest version contains 1,800 terms, and Safire tells John J. Miller how entries make the cut: “First it’s got to be a political term. Second it’s got to be in the … public discourse.” Hillary gets credit for keeping “vast right-wing conspiracy” relevant. But “vast wasteland,” used a generation ago, is still in there, since the term occasionally pops up.

Joel Rosenberg on Dead Heat

Joel Rosenberg hopes the premise of his Dead Heat, the fifth and final entry in a series of political thrillers, never comes true. He tells John J. Miller, “My novels have had an uncanny way of seeming to foreshadow coming events . . . and I really don’t want this to happen this time.”

Roy Spencer on Climate Confusion

Climatologist Roy Spencer, author of Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, tells John J. Miller that while global warming is real, its causes are not known. “The truth is that we don’t have the right observations, in let’s say the last thirty or forty years, to know whether our most recent warming is natural or manmade.”

Neil DeMause on Field of Schemes

Neil deMause, co-author with Joanna Cagan of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit, explains for John J. Miller the crime behind the title: “You’ve got sport stadiums/arenas going up all over this country, involving mostly public money, and . . . the return on all this money is all going to private hands. So you basically got taxpayers paying for buildings that are benefiting the owners of sports teams.”

Gordon Wood on The Purpose of the Past

Gordon S. Wood, author of The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, confirms for John J. Miller that the gap between academic and popular history has indeed widened. Says Woods, “I think now the academics have surrendered the field of history to outsiders, who are very good: David McCullough, Thomas Fleming, Stacy Schiff, and Walter Isaacson.”

April DeConick on The Thirteenth Apostle

The Gospel of Judas, written in the mid-2nd century and discovered in the 1970s, was recently reconstructed into a full text that has been popularly translated to describe Judas as “a friend and soul mate” of Jesus. Not so, according to April D. Deconick, author of The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. “I started to question whether Judas really was a good guy in this text,” says Deconick, and in the course of her own scholarly translation she found that Judas “was as evil as ever.”

Walter A. McDougall on Throes of Democracy

Walter McDougall, author of Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era — 1829–1877, tells John J. Miller what got him to add yet another Civil War volume to an inventory that is already quiet extensive: “Harper Collins wanted someone to write [about the war with a] moderate, and scholarly, and balanced approach that also took into account all of the latest literature that’s been done on American history. . . . I finally decided that there were so many interesting things I wanted to learn about American history, much less tell other people, that I finally agreed.”

Robert Bryce on Gusher of Lies

Robert Bryce, author of Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence, tells John J. Miller that the notion of U.S. energy independence is itself fantastical, and perilous, too. Says Bryce, “The idea that the U.S., the world’s single-biggest energy consumer, can be independent of the world’s single-biggest industry — the $5 trillion a year global energy sector — is ludicrous on its face.”

Grover Norquist on Leave Us Alone

Grover Norquist, author of Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, defines what he believes is the central vote-moving issue of the Reagan Republicans: They want to be left alone. He tells John J. Miller, “Some people want to be left alone with their income. Some people want to be left alone with their homes. Some people want to be left alone with their guns. . . . Some people want to be left alone with their faith and their family,” and on and on.

Thomas Hibbs on Arts of Darkness

Thomas Hibbs, author of Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, explains for John J. Miller that he was drawn to “a strain of film noir classics, and [even] more contemporary [noir films], that focuses upon characters who engage in a kind of quest to recover something . . . the recovery in the characters of some sense of proper orientation; of not losing oneself.”

Brian Fagan on The Great Warming

Brian Fagan, author of The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, tells John J. Miller that the warming period of 800-1200 A.D. had its good and bad sides. In Europe, Fagan says, “There was more food. The growing seasons lengthened. You got people growing cereal crops in Norway . . . They were growing wine in central England.” However, “I was shocked to find that over enormous areas of the world, there were prolonged, even epochal, droughts, particularly in the American west and over much of the Pacific.”

Joseph Wheelan on Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade

Joseph Wheelan, author of Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, describes for John J. Miller a very busy ex-president: Adams “battled slavery . . . fought the annexation of Texas . . . defended the right of women to participate in [the] political process … defended the African mutineers on the Amistad . . . and he almost single-handedly preserved James Smithson’s bequeath to America, which, as you know, became the Smithsonian Institution.”

Mark Moyar on Phoenix and the Birds of Prey

Mark Moyar, author Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam, debunks the myth that the Phoenix program was an assassination program, explaining that it was in fact an intelligence-collection effort. Where did the myth start? Moyar tells John J. Miller that it came “largely from the anti-war movement; [from] people who were looking to find things wrong with American involvement” in Vietnam.

Scott Baron on The Navy Cross

Scott Baron, co-author with James E. Wise of The Navy Cross: Extraordinary Heroism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Other Conflicts, tells John J. Miller that the heroes in this book show “valor not so much [in killing] the enemy, but [in coming] to the aid of their comrades . . . these guys are just not going to leave their buddies behind.”

Robert S. Bennett on In the Ring

Bob Bennett, author of In the Ring: The Trials of a Washington Lawyer, tells John J. Miller that he never intended to publish this memoir: “My daughter Peggy asked me in 2002 to start putting things down on paper because she thought I had an interesting life. And then … my other daughter Catherine, who works for the William Morris Agency, encouraged me to show it to one of their agents,” and the rest, as they say, is history. Miller notes the Forest Gump–like quality of the book; if it happened in the D.C. legal world, Bennett seems to have been there.

Donald Critchlow on The Conservative Ascendancy

Donald T. Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy, says ideas, organization, and leadership were crucial to the 20th century rise of the GOP Right. He tells John J. Miller that “the conservatives found leaders such as Barry Goldwater and, especially, Ronald Reagan who were able to articulate conservative ideas to the mass electorate. I should say . . . that the National Review was very important in articulating these ideas as well.”

Allen Guelzo on Lincoln and Douglas

Allen C. Guelzo, author of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America, explains for John J. Miller how the seven senatorial debates of his topic hung on the question of the extension of slavery, and thus “became more than just an Illinois event; the debates and debate text were picked up by the [national] newspapers … largely because people understood that this was a referendum on the policy solutions being offered by Stephen A. Douglas.”

David Anderegg on Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them

David Anderegg, author of Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them, tells John J. Miller that the nerds in his study are the nerds of the stereotype: They are “people who are good at math and science; who are said to be sometimes a little awkward or socially unskilled; who are deeply absorbed in things that are sometimes boring to other people; who are technologically sophisticated.” Why do we need more of them? Anderegg has the answers.

Robert Ferrigno on Sins of the Assassin

Robert Ferrigno’s Sins of the Assassin is set in the year 2043, after New York and Washington have been nuked and much of the U.S. has become an Islamic republic.  Ferrigno tells John J. Miller that the underlying theory of the novel “is that in a long war, it’s not the technology or weaponry that counts; it’s the will and conviction of the participants — who can last the longest.” But a polemic this is not. If Sins “doesn’t work as an edge-of-the-seat thriller,” Ferrigno says, “then I’ve failed as a writer.”