“Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!” (out today) is not the book I thought it would be. I was expecting a storied narrative simply about a man who stumbles into a career as a political muckraker. What I got was a lesson on the historical framework of how the evils of communism came to the shores of Southern California and now disguises itself as democracy, entertainment, network news and community organizing.
Why Does Religious Freedom Matter?
Religious liberty and a thriving religious culture are defining attributes of the United States, characterizing the American order as much as its political system and market economy.[1] From the earliest settlements of the 17th century to the great social reform causes led by religious congregations in the late 19th century and again in the 20th century, religion has been a dominant theme of American life.
Whatever happened to ‘Never Forget’?
When I was growing up, the dark miasma of the Holocaust was still so pervasive that the famous slogan “Never Forget!” seemed almost irrelevant. How could anyone forget Hitler and his murderous goose-steppers? It was hard to imagine a world where that supreme evil was not remembered as a stern and awful warning. I heard Holocaust survivors insisting that we must never forget, and I thought they were just repeating the obvious. Why did they have to keep on saying it?
When it was no longer sweet or noble to kill for the cause
If the great history lesson of the 20th century is that socialism does not work then the watershed event in that tragic enlightenment was the one that took place in Moscow 50 years ago this month – the so-called “secret speech” delivered by Nikita Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist party on February 25 1956, in which he mounted a devastating attack on Joseph Stalin, then not quite three years dead.