John J. Pitney’s Un-American: The Fake Patriotism of Donald Trump, is currently ranked 288,742 on Amazon’s bestseller list and 1,162 in sales on Amazon’s “Political Commentary and Opinion” list. Equally noteworthy is that Bill Kristol and Tom Nichols have both given the book resounding endorsements. Given the remarkable traction in sales and praise from some of today’s most relevant conservative writers, the book merits a closer look.

Pitney is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. As he explains in the book’s preface, he is a life-long Republican who voted for every Republican presidential candidate during his entire voting life until 2016. That year, the election of Donald Trump moved him to change his party registration to “independent” on election night. He has since been a fervent member of the NeverTrump camp.

The book, a compilation of every stale NeverTrump talking point out there, offers no anecdote or allegation that has not already been made elsewhere obsessively by Trump’s opponents. From “Russiagate,” the Ukraine scandal, the Charlottesville affair, the Birther movement, the Central Park jogger case, and so on, Pitney recounts every trope backed up with the same razor-thin evidence as we have heard them recounted a thousand times. Every article and tweet against the president accusing him of racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, divisiveness, corruption, and being friends with autocrats, is trotted out one after another as a slide show.

The overarching premise weaving it all together is that Trump is a “fake patriot.” Pitney asserts that while Trump likes to call other people “un-American,” it is Trump himself who is “un-American.” The election of Trump has avalanched the Shining City on the Hill. In denouncing Trump, the Democrats, the media, and every manner of leftist organization now all embrace the great American ideals that Trump, and increasingly his supporters, are spurning. 

In every war of words Trump has with politicians and pundits on the Left, Pitney comes to the defense of the latter. They are merely innocent bystanders bullied by this disgraceful orange man. For Pitney, it is Trump who has needlessly created a climate of incivility. And far from making America great again, Trump has come in to wreck it.

Pitney is writing only for the initiated. His intended audience is other NeverTrumpers who are mutually sickened by Trump. He may also be writing it for some mainstream leftists who might enjoy the novelty of having their hatred for the president validated by a Republican college professor. But Trump’s smarter opponents, even on the Left, would not feel they have gained anything from reading this book.

There are seven chapters, six of which are named for a different line in the Declaration of Independence. Within each, Pitney shows us all the many ways that Trump represents the antithesis of Jefferson’s words. But the title of the whole book is key. For Pitney, Trump is uniquely “un-American.” Every president from George Washington to Barack Obama is described as having lived up to the ideals of the American promise until Trump came along to shatter them.

In Pitney’s telling, the context in which Trump entered the fray of American politics was one of civil controversy. In Pitney’s world, the Left treats the Right with respect and collegiality, the media is fair to Republicans, and every president from both parties has been worthy of the high office, until now.

He is particularly critical of the evangelical support for a man who does not live a Christian life. He calls their support for him a “Faustian bargain.” That is a particularly low blow to the many Christians who understand what is at stake.

But most importantly, Pitney does not address what Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters like about him, nor does he seem even remotely curious about that. In Pitney’s world, the most steadfast Trump supporters are Klansmen and neo-Nazis. 

I live in Youngstown, Ohio, in the midst of “Trump Country.” I invite Pitney to come here to the Rust Belt and meet with the kind of Trump supporters he is unlikely to come across in Southern California. They are patriotic, freedom-loving, working-class Americans who support him precisely because he offers an entirely different brand of politics. They like Trump because he hears their voice of anger at the very establishment elite Pitney seems to prefer will remain in control in Washington. Are they “un-American” too?

Why has Pitney even been a Republican his whole voting life?

If he is a life-long Republican, does he not see it a good thing that Trump has created a much more conservative federal judiciary and has made major strides in dismantling the bureaucracy? Does he not prefer that Mike Pompeo and not a liberal like Susan Rice is running the State Department? Is it not a good thing that Betsy DeVos—and not a teacher’s union stooge—is the education secretary? Would he prefer a climate alarmist heading up the EPA? Would he prefer that we have a Democrat in office signing off on progressive legislation?

And does Pitney honestly believe that the Democrats care about character and civility? Has he forgotten the Paul Wellstone memorial? Does he not see that Republicans are routinely vilified in the media and on university campuses? Does he not see that it has been the Left, not Trump, that has divided America with their rhetoric? The Left certainly does not believe America is exceptional, but rather that it is a nation built on bigotry, slavery, greed, and imperialism.

The Republicans have tried (and failed) continuously with the kind of morally decent candidates that Pitney likes. Mitt Romney arguably ran the most honorable presidential campaign in decades, yet his opponents still portrayed him as a sinister demon who wanted to kill their grandmothers and put African-Americans “back in chains,” and a sexist for asking for women’s résumés to be brought to him in binders. And Romney stood by and took it. Why does Pitney not see the necessity of having someone who fights back?

The most cringe-worthy section of the book is the one where he tries to psychoanalyze Trump. According to Pitney, Trump’s many harsh words for Obama are motivated by “envy and psychological projection.” And before comparing these two presidents’ academic records, as if that matters, Pitney adds, “Obama is younger, thinner, smarter, and more physically vigorous than his successor.” He asserts that Trump is subconsciously jealous of his predecessor’s intelligence, charm, and physique. It seems that, like Chris Matthews, Pitney also gets a tingle up his leg at the thought of former President Obama.

It would be helpful if Pitney reexamined his animosity to Trump and his misguided nostalgia for Democrat presidents. Republican political scientists are a rare commodity and Republicans on campus can use all the help they can get.

So, Professor Pitney, instead of leaving the party and writing angry books about Trump, why not make your criticisms constructive? Why not help Trump to be better?

On the night of October 6, 1998, the robbery and beating of a University of Wyoming student named Matthew Shepard put a microscope on the quiet college community of Laramie, Wyoming. Shepard, small and fragile in build and openly gay, had been found by a mountain biker tied to a fence “like a Halloween scarecrow.” 

Six days later, after attempts to keep him alive failed, Shepard died and forever entered the public mind as a martyr and a namesake of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (2009). 

Two men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, were arrested and charged with Shepard’s murder. The motive of the crime, thanks to conflicting statements by McKinney and his girlfriend Kristen Price, was assumed to be homophobia. The murder sent shockwaves through the country, as gay rights activists protested nationwide in response to unverified media reports about the motive, while both gay and anti-gay activists such as Reverend Fred Phelps picketed the trial of McKinney. By 2000, theaters across the country were performing the play The Laramie Project based on statements of locals and people who knew Shepard. The play was later adapted as a film in 2002 by HBO.

But, in 2004, ABC’s “20/20” aired a one-hour report with anchor Elizabeth Vargas that in numerous ways contradicted the accepted story about the murder. Based primarily on the investigative work of Stephen Jimenez, the report showed that, far from being a hate crime, Shepard’s murder likely was the result of his and McKinney’s activities within the local methamphetamine trade. 

Price also recanted her hearsay statement about Shepard attempting a sexual advance on McKinney, and it was further revealed that both Shepard and McKinney may have been involved in male prostitution. In 2013, Jimenez released The Book of Matt, the product of more than a dozen years of his research into the evidence known at the time of the murder as well as other pieces only revealed later thanks to his numerous interviews with prosecutor Cal Rerucha. 

I interviewed Jimenez in March in anticipation of the June 30 release of an updated edition of his book.

Russell Henderson, an Accomplice Not a Murderer

In our conversation, Jimenez was clear on several points that are central to the book. He made a bold separation between McKinney and his accomplice, Henderson, who pleaded guilty thereby foregoing a trial; and in numerous conversations face to face with Jimenez during prison visits, Henderson reiterated his remorse over Shepard’s death. 

According to all evidence available, Henderson’s role in the murder was limited to following McKinney’s instruction to tie Shepard to the fence. But indeed, as Jimenez points out both in our interview and in the book, McKinney had assaulted several other people within the same 24-hour period, including two Hispanic men in Laramie, fellow meth cohort Monty Durand at the home of his cousin Dean McKinney, and Henderson himself during Shepard’s murder when Henderson tried to stop the beating. 

According to Jimenez, who continues to keep in touch with various contemporaries of both McKinney and Henderson, there is no evidence of an underlying motive of hate, nor that Henderson had any intent to murder Shepard.

The theme of homophobia and hate crimes, thick in the dialogue of The Laramie Project and in media reporting on the murder, is also refuted by Jimenez. 

“I’ve spent a lot of time in Wyoming, over decades. Remember that in connection with this book I went there . . . it was in the early winter of 2000 that I went to begin working on this case. And I’ve got to say that I don’t find Wyoming any more or less homophobic than any other place,” he said. (Jimenez is a native of Brooklyn, New York.)

The Symbol vs. the Secrets

Jimenez’s award-winning investigative work with ABC News and the subsequent publication of his book have not gone unanswered by those who have made Shepard’s life and murder a sanctified rallying point, and who see the journalist’s revelations as defamatory. 

In response to his critics, Jimenez repeated several crucial points. Nine law enforcement officers and prosecutors connected to the murder case overwhelmingly support the conclusions of the book regarding McKinney and Shepard both being involved in using, buying, and selling meth. Federal agents sent in 1998 to investigate the crime as a violation of Shepard’s civil rights were unable to find evidence to support it and left empty-handed after several weeks of investigation.

McKinney and Shepard were seen together in the company of Laramie limousine driver Doc O’Connor in the months prior to the murder, according to multiple named sources. All of these circumstances contradict the notion that McKinney and Shepard were “strangers” and that McKinney became enraged at him over a sexual advance on the night he was killed. 

Perhaps least surprising was the politicization of Shepard’s murder. 

According to Jimenez, two Clinton White House VIPs were dispatched to the funeral, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Togo West and then-deputy staff secretary Sean Patrick Maloney, who is himself gay. For Maloney, the murder became the springboard for him to become the legal advisor for the Matthew Shepard Foundation. 

According to one profile, Maloney’s interview with Vargas was edited out of the “20/20” broadcast in order to fit the investigation’s portrayal of the murder being motivated by drugs. I asked Jimenez about Maloney and his comparison of Shepard’s murder to the legendary lynching of Mississippi black teen Emmett Till in 1955. His response was sharp:

[Maloney’s] attempt to instruct me that Matthew Shepard is to gay civil rights what Emmett Till is to the civil rights movement, is pure baloney. First of all, the cause of gay civil rights does not hang somehow on the tragic murder of Matthew Shepard.

Jimenez also told me that during Judy Shepard’s interview with Vargas, Maloney admonished Jimenez to “tread lightly here . . . because of what Matt is as a symbol.” In the 2000s Maloney made a failed bid for New York State Attorney General and was a staff member of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, before being elected to Congress in 2012 for the state’s 18th district.

Jimenez analogized the willful ignorance or suppression of the facts in the Shepard case that did not get reported by the media to the type of irresponsible and misleading reporting that led to the Iraq War, or to those who have objected to investigations into the sordid but verified details of Thomas Jefferson’s private life and his sexual relationships with his own slaves.

The Underground Addiction

The topic of methamphetamine and its impact on crime and violence were strong themes both of The Book of Matt and our discussion. 

Jimenez reiterated over and over that the meth epidemic was already in full bloom in late-1990s Wyoming, and law enforcement was hopelessly behind in addressing it. He also agreed that while the nation at large has been hard hit by the rise of meth and opioid addiction, that “crystal meth in particular has been a very serious problem in the gay community.”

Jimenez told me during a follow-up that in his new edition he is including new witness accounts and research that further supports his findings against the critics of the book. Laramie County Sheriff Dave O’Malley, who was the lead police investigator of the murder, consistently has denied that Shepard was dealing meth. But in a new chapter, Jimenez cites a 2004 interview of Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, in which she admits that she was at least aware of his meth use when he lived in Denver. This point of contention is just one example of how tightly the official myth of a hate crime is protected.

True Crime Journalism as It Once Was

Jimenez’s brand of reporting is an endangered species in the wasteland of modern media. As an outsider responding to the Shepard murder, Jimenez gained the trust and confidence of prosecutors, police, and acquaintances of the three main figures in the case over several years. He did not ignore the inconvenient facts that dispelled the myth of a murder driven by raging bigotry and took many risks to his own physical safety in meeting dealers who knew the truth of McKinney and Shepard’s deep involvement with crystal meth. 

In responding to my highlighting of skeptics’ criticism of The Book of Matt, Jimenez answered, “If you want to believe that this was simply about homophobia, OK, then you’re just opening yourself to having many, many other drug-related [crimes]; because you don’t want to look at how this one actually happened.”

It’s the great irreducible truth of human existence. Human beings flourish best when they are raised with a mother and a father, as well as brothers and sisters who can challenge them, protect them, and show them how the world works. Without such a structure, children are vulnerable to depression, anger, and addiction. All the liberal denials can’t change that.

While the importance of family is the theme of countless conservative articles and position papers, the obvious importance of family has found touching new expression in an unexpected place: a rock ’n’ roll memoir. All I Ever Wanted: A Rock and Roll Memoir is a new book by Kathy Valentine, who plays bass for the girl band The Go-Go’s. Those who come to the book looking for sex, drugs and New Wave music will find it. But the more salient theme is Valentine’s longing for and defense of the traditional family. It’s not an exaggeration to say that she sometimes sounds like Ann Coulter. I’m not kidding.

Born in 1959, Valentine is the daughter of an Air Force serviceman, Clifford Wheeler, and a free spirit mom, Margaret Valentine. The two met in England and then moved to Lubbock, where Kathy was born, and then moved on to Austin. The couple divorced in 1962, an event that was devastating for Valentine, who, but a child at the time, buried her grief. Years later her mother described how Valentine would wait on the front stoop for her father to return and “cry inconsolably,” leaving Kathy to wonder “how decades could have passed with me unable to acknowledge that childhood grief.”

It got worse. Margaret Valentine embraced the 1970s free-love era in all its excesses and ill-advised stupidity. Dressed in tights or a mini-skirt, mom “hung out with a circle of academics and bohemian intellectuals,” smoked pot with her daughter, and slept with one of Kathy’s teenage friends.

“I read constantly or escaped into an imaginary life crafted with elaborate but mundane fantasies about normal families, best friends, and romances,” she writes. “I could gaze out a window or stare blank-faced at a wall replacing recurring, tedious storylines. Sometimes I wonder if the neural pathways for addiction might have started with my penchant for checking out to daydream.”

Again and again, Valentine turns to this theme, her anger at her parents’ refusal to protect her churning just below the surface. “How do you misbehave when nothing is off-limits?” she asks.

When Valentine gets a visit from cousin AJ, it’s a revelation: “I still couldn’t believe I had actual guys as family members. Deprived of brothers and a father, I was enamored of AJ’s male-ness, easy assurance, and cockeyed cast.”

As a teenager, Valentine got into drugs, sex, and skipping school. She had an abortion while in high school, an account that is searing and tragic: “It took me a long time to understand or cultivate compassion.”

Valentine was saved, as so many are, by rock ’n’ roll. Her first eureka moment came in the mid-1970s. During a visit to England, she saw American glam rocker and bassist Suzi Quatro performing on the popular British music television program Top of the Pops. Valentine had her goal: to be in a band with other like-minded female musicians.

“I thought I was just playing guitar the way I played violin in grade school,” Valentine said in a  recent interview. “It never occurred to me that I could be in a band, like Keith Richards [in the Rolling Stones], It just didn’t cross my mind until I saw Suzi Quatro in a band. It was like, ‘That’s all I wanted to do.’”

In late 1980, Valentine connected with an all-female L.A. punk group called the Go-Go’s: singer Belinda Carlisle, guitarist Jane Wiedlin, guitarist-keyboardist Charlotte Caffey, and drummer Gina Schock. Valentine, who had been a guitarist in small groups, switched to bass, spending three days learning the Go-Go’s songs before filling in for the band’s usual bassist who was out sick. The group was impressed with her playing, and Valentine suddenly found herself a member of one of the most groundbreaking, joyful, fun and talented groups of the 1980s.

Hit songs such as “Our Lips Our Sealed,” “Vacation,” and “We Got the Beat” made them rich and famous. There was also “Head Over Heels,” featuring one of the greatest bass breaks in pop history.

As expected, Valentine recounts the excess of the 1980s—the sex, celebrities, videos, cocaine, fights. It’s fun, juicy stuff, but not as profound as the sections where Valentine describes getting sober. She eventually has a daughter, Audrey, and slowly begins to assemble a family, which is “all I ever wanted.”

In the end, Valentine offers a beautiful summation: she has a reconciliation with her father before his death, her dissipated mother gets sober, and Valentine moves from L.A. back to Austin, finally to live as a family. This is a wise and spiritually rich book by a true rock and roll survivor.

The book’s intricate title, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, enlists readers into the spirit of revolution. It appeals to thirsty intellects and to those who long for noble actions, with its careful reading of profound documents and appreciation of monumental actions, thus asserting the political and moral power of words. We gird ourselves for an exciting read.

The book has particular fascination for me, because I know the author—we were colleagues at Ashland University in the 1990s, and Brad Thompson is now professor of political philosophy at Clemson University. I have long admired his audacity, intellect, and love of America, even as I strongly disagreed with some of his ideas.

Thompson’s patriotism is that of an immigrant (from Canada) and his determination that of an athlete (track). And, given such self-made qualities of soul, one is not surprised to encounter insightful studies of the evolution of American identity, natural rights doctrine, and the founders’ prudence, all organized in the form of elaborations of key phrases of the Declaration.

Do I know the author too well to do an objective review? Despite the legitimacy of this question, I offer the review as a gentle corrective of his presentation of major issues of our time. The reader will have to judge—I am no objectivist in that sense at any rate.

The book proceeds with chapters on what the author takes to be the Declaration’s Enlightenment background, the laws of nature, self-evident truths, equality, slavery (well worth consulting in light of the 1619 Project), rights, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” consent of the governed, consent and justice, and revolution. It concludes with exhortations on Americanism and the American mind. The book as a whole is scholarship with a political purpose. As Thomas Pangle says, the book is “at once eloquent and erudite.”

With barely a mention of him, Thompson does not take up Harry Jaffa’s argument from A New Birth of Freedom (2000) about the Declaration. That is, there is no attempt to find an Aristotelian or ancient grounding in the American founding. Thus the author often makes extreme claims (that he later qualifies, for example, about how and in what sense America is Lockean or how America’s Founders reflected Enlightenment principles).

In particular, he downplays the role of religion in the founding in a way that makes the book dependent on America as a sign of the advance of the Enlightenment, with its peculiar form of reason and its banishment of religion, rather than the theological-political question that the Declaration promulgates. After Christianity, freedom in the modern world requires that its defenders acknowledge the tension between reason and revelation as the source of civilization.

The book is an elaborate attempt to undo that tension on behalf of Enlightenment reason. Thus, for example, he declares

Locke’s epistemological goal was moral: in a world inundated with religious mysticism, his intention was to show that man’s rational faculties were in fact capable of discovering and knowing objective moral laws for the purpose of guiding human conduct.

In this regard, Thompson’s portrayal parallels the dispute between Jaffa and Martin Diamond, and thus the difference between the West and the East Coast Straussians. And indeed that is reflected in some of the blurbs from George Will, Harvey Mansfield, and Thomas Pangle, not to mention several other eminent scholars, such as a principal teacher of Thompson, the historian Gordon Wood.

But we would err to label Thompson any kind of Straussian either—recall his often astute critique of some students of Leo Strauss, such as Bill Kristol, for their promotion of a reckless foreign policy and their compromises with Progressivism in Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea. 

Rather than survey his entire argument, we should first jump to his conclusion, from which we can evaluate the book. Key parts of the book are found in this excerpt at American Greatness.

In concluding, Thompson is rhapsodic in his praise of Tocquevillian America:

This new American creed of “rational liberty” did not mean that its practitioners lived alienated and crabbed lives in atomistic isolation from one another . . . . Quite the opposite. These rugged American individualists joined together in bonds of civic friendship as they experienced and lived through seemingly never-ending disasters . . . . The moral and political philosophy by which they lived their lives was no antisocial creed that confined men to their own spiritual cages. Together, as friends and neighbors, the westward-moving Americans built—literally—cabins, houses, barns, roads, canals, libraries, schools, colleges, villages, towns, and cities. Freedom produced unparalleled social cooperation.

Later he hails this as a “natural system of liberty” which “encouraged and generated new associations and bonds of civil cooperation.” But it was not mere self-interest, which Tocqueville explicitly denies can be the source of those aristocratic bodies he saw in American civil associations. More to the point, the bulk of the examples Tocqueville describes are associations that are explicitly or implicitly religious, from churches to charities. Most of these associations are religious in both their origin and purpose.

This is not surprising. Early in Democracy in America, Tocqueville speaks of America’s unique unity of the spirit of freedom and the spirit of religion. The two are “perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and succeeded marvelously.” Moreover, as Tocqueville says later, “Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other . . . .” But Thompson would expunge Christianity not only from Tocqueville’s account but from America’s self-understanding. He even goes so far as to say,

This, then, was the great paradox of American society: it united radical individualism with tight bonds of civil association. The former was responsible for the latter. It was e pluribus unum.

Thompson knows perfectly well that the “one from many” enshrined by e pluribus unum was the one nation out of many states, not many individuals. To speak of “a natural system of liberty” is as misleading as the “religious mysticism” he derides.

As much as I admire Tocqueville, he is a compromised source for Thompson’s endeavor, because of his suspicion of American patriotism (a separate topic) and of the Declaration of Independence as a philosophic document. For the latter, see Tocqueville’s letter from America to his cousin Chabrol on July 16, 1831. He honors the sentiments that the Declaration engenders but, unlike Thompson, not its teaching. After all, Tocqueville never mentions the Declaration in his 700-page classic.

But perhaps Thompson, agreeing with Tocqueville on the fading of the force of religion and hence of the mores required for freedom, wishes to supply the decay of religion with his version of reason and thus refound a dying American morality and with it the American regime.

What Thompson evidently wants to do is substitute his Enlightenment natural right epistemology for that of Tocqueville, and withal his own Enlightenment rationality for the theological-political unity Tocqueville struggled with. This is not just a point about misinterpreting Tocqueville but, even more important, it is ignoring what is central  in the Declaration: the theological-political dynamic.

I don’t believe I’m being unreasonable to suggest he winds up doing something more like what is described in Mary Shelley’s novel about a Modern Prometheus, sewing together the corpses of Tocqueville and the Founders into another, superior (as he sees it) America. This is a kind of Jefferson Bible version of America. In describing it thus, I honor this amazing and ambitious book.

Like all other attempts to undo what Leo Strauss built up, and Harry Jaffa following him tried to continue, this one falters. Much of this goes back to the way Thompson reads Locke. Compare Edward Erler’s understanding of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its relation to the Declaration. “Locke treated the ‘pursuit of happiness’ not as a natural right but as a moral duty. The American founders, however, translated Locke’s understanding of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ into both a natural right and a moral duty,” Erler argues in Property and the Pursuit of Happiness. He quotes Thomas West, for Locke “the pursuit of happiness is the fundamental natural inclination—not self preservation . . . .”

West’s elaborate 2017 study, The Political Theory of the American Founding, covers much of the same ground as Revolutionary Mind but is both far more sober in its project and more revolutionary at the same time.

With its focus on state practices, West’s book can be more explicit in its treatment of both morality (including marriage and sexual morality) and property, the subjects of the second and third parts of his book, about 250 pages.. West affirms some of Thompson’s views of the Declaration’s morality but also takes the argument to other places. For example, writes West, “Pangle and Mansfield are far from being the only scholars who accept the ‘Nietzschean’ view that the higher and rarer virtues are missing in the founding.” He then goes on to quote Martin Diamond and Gordon Wood to the same effect.

West then proceeds to show how the American Founders and the ordinary citizens manifested moral virtues such as courage and explains how Nietzsche’s “herd morality” embraces some noble traits, “‘Under different names,’ to use Nietzsche’s phrase, force and fraud might be called courage and prudence, the very virtues praised by the founders . . . .” All this to show how work on the Founding opens up discussion even further on important, central themes. We know the founders even less than we think we do. And we distort their teaching by seeing more agreement on some issues than we might think there is.

And to use Lincoln most effectively Thompson, besides appealing to the scientific electric cord metaphor for human equality, also should have looked at the biblical one of “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh”—both scientific revelation and support for the Declaration that Lincoln laid out in his famous speech of July 10, 1858. And, even more striking, Thompson omits Lincoln’s succinct definition of slavery there: “you work and I eat.”

We know today whom Lincoln was describing as the new slaveholders—those who live off of transfer payments and globalist economics, which throttle a dynamic society of those who would rise through hard work.

Thus, Thompson’s dismissal of the theological-political issue makes him miss some major points. And the book fails to acknowledge adequately other work, such as Jaffa’s New Birth of Freedom, which points the way to an even more revolutionary understanding.

In the preface to America’s Revolutionary Mind we see the young boy Brad reading a book about the American Revolution and then knowing “that I was an American born in the wrong country.” That phrase recalls a monograph by a late colleague of his at the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University, fellow immigrant (from Hungary) the late Peter Schramm, author of “Born American But in the Wrong Place.” Both of these imposing additions to America got to the right place and knew that patriotism was not enough, but came to understand her in different ways.