Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: Leaving the Sandbox (2014)

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Grand strategy for Libertarians in an era of wanton federal crimes and terror
by Brian Wright

Reposting this review on the eve of my 2018 campaign for state representative in Michigan. The LP is the vehicle upon which I’m seeking the office, but my mission is more fundamental: establishing a system in Michigan for First Principles grand juries via legis-lative act. My brochure lies here: http://brianrwright.com/BW38th.pdf. The book reviewed is about how the LP became controlled opposition and must change its stripes entirely. A bit dated now thanks to my First Principles GJ route, but still worthwhile ideas for the LP.  

FrontReviewed by the author.

Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism…

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.

— Aldous Huxley

Leaving the Sandbox is my book on grand strategy for the Libertarian Party, in particular,  and for the liberty movement in general (in terms of what can be done sans party to bring about a free society).

From the Foreword

The motive force of the Old Paradigm—a political-economic Western Cabal with immense and concentrated state power and material resources—is desperately trying to hang on to its Old World privileges. The average American feels this in the onrushing accouterments of the federalized, militarized police state, where citizens have all the rights the Occupying Government tells us we can have. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Longest Walk (2015)

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“My epic trek from tip to tip of the Americas” (1977-1983), Author’s Edition
by George Meegan, Free Man Publishing Company, 2015

TLWSure there’s a lot of background to the ultimate edition of a sleeper book that I expect will fire the popular imagination of large numbers of youth of the world who still read… in no time at all. George Meegan is a one-of-a-kinder, who grew up from nothing in jolly ol’ England, dreamed of being an adventurer, dropped out of school to join the British merchant marine, then decided one day he would walk the Americas from South to North. And did.

This account doesn’t have any counterpart in the literature of the ages: it’s at once a journal and also an ever-morphing flow of humanity through the window of an intrepid Englishman’s eyes and shoes (twelve pair, 19,019 miles). It’s an indescribable delight to join with this work as its final editor, to appreciate the original writing, of course, yet also the fine editing work performed by exceptionally caring individuals at Dodd, Mead, and Company before it succumbed to death by the conglomerates—here’s the kicker, Dodd, Mead went belly up just as Longest Walk the First is about to go to press! Continue reading →

Book Review: Fire and Fury (2018)

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Inside the Trump White House
By Michael Wolff

This one is a very popular, stand-in-a-long-waiting-list-at-your-library narrative from an individual who had remarkable access or at least implicit fly-on-the-wall observation authority during many of the turbulent hours of the Trump presidency for the first 100 days and then some. Michael Wolff is an unabashed part of the Mainstream ‘Program,’ yet withal IMHO a mostly objective reporter—at least within hailing distance of the Hunter S. Thompson ‘gonzo journalism’ model—of what all went  on. Plus, he writes clearly with understated, therefore, occasionally ROFL humor.

To use a phrase that comes to mind, “nobody could make this s**t up.” And Wolff’s timing and level of description are impeccable. It’s quite easy for someone who is only vaguely familiar with the mainstream noise—I cancelled my cable and rarely watch broadcast channels—to follow who’s doing what to whom and where they’re coming from in their careers and motivations.

For instance, I had no idea that Trump’s chief of staff is or was, like, a triumvirate:

  • Steve Bannon (the, some would say, alt-right ideologue who fashioned himself as the Rasputin to the Donald)
  • Rience Priebus (from the Republican National Committee), and
  • Jared/Ivanka (Jarvanka: Ivanka is Trump’s daughter and Jared is a rip-roarin’ member of the ultra-Jewish-supremacist cult, Chabad Lubavitch).

One wonders why Wolff was able to enjoy such a ring side seat in the Trump White House, but as he points out, the lack of structure in that bizarre environment enabled him to simply hang out there with nobody questioning his credentials. Still I would take about 30% of his blow by blows with a wheel-barrow-sized grain of salt: they just read too akin to creative fiction. But it’s DYNAMITE creative fiction, for the most part, especially when Wolff gives wording to Trump’s range of the moment states of mind. For example, here’s a segment of the speech—obviously not fiction—Trump delivered to 300 CIA personnel at their Langley, VA, headquarters on January 21, 2017 (his first presidential act, throwing away a carefully prepared text): Continue reading →

Book Review: The War on Terror (2017)

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The plot to rule the Middle East
by Christopher Bollyn
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Talk about the perfect book to come along at the right time, The War on Terror is a godsend. For one thing, it’s brief, more important, concise, a book you can hand to a public official or even one of the three good mainstream journalists, and chances are maybe 10% they’ll read it… and correct their thinking.

Lately, Chris Bollyn, long an acclaimed inde-pendent international journalist who has hereto-fore focused on the evidence for Israel’s role in 9/11, has been arguing brilliantly for the dual, related frauds of 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror. This book lays out the convincing if not irrefutable case for the latter: the Israeli-Zionist deep state architecting and execution of the Western Cabal’s war OF terror and Empire to which innocent people of the world have been mercilessly subjected for going-on five decades… the ultimate objective being to fulfill the Greater Israel Project for full-spectrum dominance or destruction of Israel’s neighbors, then the remainder of the planet.

Mr. Bollyn helps the world’s thinkers and carers to finally turn the corner and call out those responsible for all these crimes. [The method I envision is a specially composed inter-national people’s grand jury serving as a Truth and Justice Commission along the para-meters we saw in indicting and undoing the apartheid state of South Africa.]

Background Reading

I feel the reader will find a better grasp of the global forces at play from the following works:

  • My own The Barrier Cloud—a module of my watershed, The Sacred Nonaggression Principle, which I made into a standalone booklet, it describes two essential meta concepts needed for understanding the Western Cabal. 1) The Barrier Cloud itself, and 2) The Men of the Power Sickness (MOPS) archetype and their motivation.
  • Alison Weir’s book—Against Our Better Judgment: How the US was used to create Israel: an interesting history lesson, showing the high-level machinations (beginning with the UK’s Balfour Statement in 1917) behind setting up Israel as a Zionist apartheid state despite no initial popular support in the American Jewish community.
  • Christopher Bollyn’s landmark uncovering of 9/11—Solving 9/11: The deception that changed the world. I reviewed it here. He provides an account that the evidence for Israel’s leading role in planning and execution of 9/11 is overwhelming: destruction of the WTC structural steel, foreknowledge, the suppressed Dancing Israelis story, email notices to Israeli individuals working at the WTCs, etc.
  • Gilad Atzmon’s The Wandering Who?—A true masterpiece, which I have just recently read and reviewed here. It is also a bold and brave book that explores the true nature of what authors like Weir and Bollyn might simply call Zionism but what Atzmon reasons a large segment of (“third category”) Jews is a ‘meta-Zionism,’ constituting a humanitarian prob-lem because of its vastly destructive, collective-mind orient-ation, and now with the Jewish State, unbridled POWER.

Of course, there are many other works forming a background for what Mr. Bollyn is presenting in his devastating handbook about the War on Terror. Dr. Alan Sabrosky, who writes the foreword to the book, notably articulates the case for 9/11 being a “classic Mossad operation” in this landmark video here, and others. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Wandering Who? (2011)

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A study of Jewish Identity politics, by Gilad Atzmon
Perhaps the most significant book on the power metapolitics of our age
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

The Wandering Who? is one of those wholly extraordinary and intellectually sharp, even entertaining, missives in which readers will want to place a highlight on every other page. It is simply the most enlightening book you will read in the next decade or two about one of the most important subjects affecting the modern course of our species: the origin and rationale of “Jewish-ness” and its manifestations.

For roughly a decade, I’ve read a number of articles and books about and given thought to the puzzle. What is a Jew, fair and proper? Need I be concerned one way or the other? Friend or foe? Pro liberty or anti? Are Jews merely practitioners of a faith, a religion—if so, how does the fundamental doctrine square with humanitarian norms or my own secular Trumanism? Or are they, themselves, an ethnic identity, a ‘people’ who have generally been suppressed by conventional Christian society thru the ages? Or have they self-ostracized from surrounding culture, feeling chosen by God? Do they disdain, despise, and/or work to harness the non-Jew? Do they have an affinity for collectivism/communism? Further, how do we figure the genealogy? What percentage of  modern Jews, for example, descend, not from the Holy Land, rather from the Khazars of  the 8th Century? [Ref. Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe (1976).]

Gilad Atzmon, perhaps the most unlikely of sources, yet a truly exceptional intellect, has laid all the answers bare… in terms that, well, a fairly conceptually oriented mind will find simple and straightforward. The material is not difficult, but does presuppose an interest in reading sparkling, independent scholarly treatises.

Since reading Alison Weir’s equally vital work on Zionism and Israel several years ago, Against Our Better Judgment: How the United States was used to create Israel, I have thought, along with Ms. Weir and many others, that the essential problem is that many Jews embrace the political philosophy/movement of Zionism and its resulting apartheid state of Israel. I still lean that way, but Atzmon suggests that these notions are facile, unrooted, or, at least, incomplete.

Continue reading →

Book Review: Like I Was Saying (1984)

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Select columns from the immortal independent newspaper columnist, Mike Royko
Reviewed by Brian R. Wright

Let’s take a journey thru yesteryear, which of course was only yesterday, to pay some homage with even a jab or two to Mike Royko, the newspaper man who made Chicago famous. These are selections from his columns for The Daily News, The Sun-Times, and The Tribune spanning 1966-1984. The sad fact is, while I was up and reading leading columnists for a good portion of that period—I came to Detroit in 1969, which is a mere 282 miles from the Windy City, and in those days still almost as happenin’—I never made a habit of enjoying Mr. Royko’s salt-of-the-earth daily columns.

A remarkable man who definitely earned his stripes as an afflictor of the powerful. The first thing that jumps out at those of us who are into the ‘English thing’ is that the proper usage of like and as has been violated. [The grammatically correct phrase is ‘As I was saying.’] Revealing Mr. Mike’s blue collar spokesman image, in pointed fashion. Indeed, one might well characterize Royko as the prototype of politically incorrectness. From a biography:

“Royko was ostensibly a liberal journalist, but a liberal journalist with a sense of the outrage of the common citizen. Therefore, he was at the forefront of those who questioned Gary Hart’s judgment rather than his morals, had a nationally celebrated fight with AT & T, and wrote a column castigating those social workers who were attempting to get men in pool rooms to find regular jobs. Additionally, he was generally unsupportive of political correctness, of those who are young and fail to function within the political system, of police departments that fail to protect the average person, and of those politicians who see people as part of —the problem. Royko was credited with first calling former California Governor Jerry Brown “Governor Moonbeam,” and he rarely saw virtue in those who voiced the idea of the criminal as the victim.”

That’ll bring up my two jabs: Continue reading →

Book Review: Atheism: The Case against God (1979)

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Every nook and cranny of the argument
by George H. Smith
Review by Brian R. Wright

This book is from a special era, when one of the major issues of the young budding World Libertarian was faith vs. reason, usually represented in belief in a supernatural being or not.[1] As an ideologue and activist in the early American libertarian movement—let’s pick a timeframe: I’ll say from the publication of Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) to the 1979 Libertarian Party Nominating Convention in Los Angeles, California—I took part in a number of debates on the existence of God. My intellectual foundation was located principally in the works of Aristotle, and Ayn Rand, who was an explicit advocate of reason.

Rand, although an atheist, didn’t dwell on making arguments against the various intellectual citadels of faith the various religions, particularly Christian ones, put out to support their concepts of God. As Nathaniel Branden, at one time Rand’s designated intellectual heir, put it: Objectivists don’t spend a lot of time examining the follies of mystic belief, including the idea of “God.” In his words, “The adversary is too unworthy.” Which of course you can take in a couple of ways; if you didn’t hang with the Randians, you probably thought it a bit high-handed. Still, Branden wrote what I regard as one of the best arguments against the standard concept of God as first cause. I have it as a jpeg, and will post on my site here:

If everything in the universe requires a cause, doesn’t the universe itself require a cause, which is God?

This little gem helped me win a few arguments with the rampant Christian faithniks of that era, though to be fair, when one side advocates reason and the other side advocates faith—which in this context is the acceptance of ideas or allegations in the absence of sensory evidence or rational demonstration—the advocate of reason has a big edge… if people in the audience care about logic. Anyway, I liked the Branden take on causality being in the universe, not the universe being in causality, and one thing led to another. I was always a reader, and theism fascinated me. The following two books were key: Continue reading →