Having finished a couple of books, I am moving onto a couple of new works to keep me busy.
The first book, one I am about halfway through, is Secret Empires by Peter Schweizer. Schweizer is the author of Clinton Cash, a book that very likely helped derail the anointed Presidential run of Hillary Clinton, leading to the election of Donald Trump and a year and a half (and counting) of Hillary Clinton screeching to anyone who will listen the myriad reasons other than being a terrible person why she lost. You can read my review of Clinton Cash here but suffice it to say that Schweizer made a compelling case that Hillary used her influence as Secretary of State to enrich her own family through the use of her “family foundation” and speaking gigs for her “husband”. Secret Empires looks at how politicians get around ethics rules by making their relatives rich by leveraging their influence with foreign governments and even the U.S. government. From Mitch McConnell to Joe Biden to Barack Obama, chapter after chapter reveals the utter corruption of many of our elected leaders.
The second book I just started is Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen. Rather than a Rush Limbaugh-esque attack on “liberalism” defined as the leftist American political philosophy, Deneen is speaking in the more classical sense of the word liberalism and contrasts liberalism with fascism and communism and the problems that are coming to light in the political philosophy that survived while communism and fascism did not. I am hoping he looks at some alternatives for the future to replace liberalism because it seems to me that the great Western liberal experiment is coming to a crashing halt and what might replace it seems uncertain at best.