Government Control

When he left Congress in 2017, Jason Chaffetz still thought elections could save us. For generations, conservatives have hoped that freedom-loving congressional majorities could turn back the tide and restore America’s liberties and prosperity. But now, he says, winning elections will not be enough.

In Operation Shakespeare, investigative journalist John Shiffman traces a high-risk undercover operation launched by an elite undercover Homeland Security unit created to stop the Iranians, Russians, Chinese, Pakistanis, and North Koreans from acquiring sophisticated American-made electronics capable of guiding missiles, jamming radar, and triggering countless weapons - from wireless IEDs to nuclear bombs.

Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China’s Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated harnessing of data. It is a story born in Silicon Valley and America’s “War on Terror,” and now playing out in alarming ways on China’s remote Central Asian frontier. As a minority separatist movement strains against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI.

This timely book focuses on President Obama's deeply considered strategy toward Iran's nuclear program and reveals how the historic agreement of 2015 broke the persistent stalemate in negotiations that had blocked earlier efforts. Drawing from more than 75 in-depth interviews with key decision-makers, including Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry, this is the first authoritative account of President Obama's signature foreign policy achievement.

Haiti’s state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters that destroyed much of Haiti’s infrastructure. How did a nation founded on liberation come to such a precipice? Jake Johnston, researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, reveals how US and European capitalist goals re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it.

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong. Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right.

As the data economy grows in power, Carissa Véliz exposes how our privacy is eroded by big tech and governments, why that matters and what we can do about it. The moment you check your phone in the morning you are giving away your data. Before you've even switched off your alarm, a whole host of organisations have been alerted to when you woke up, where you slept and with whom. As you check the weather, scroll through your 'suggested friends' on Facebook, you continually compromise your privacy.

The gun control debate is revived with every mass shooting. But far more people die from gun deaths on the street corners of inner city America and across the border as Mexico’s powerful cartels battle to control the drug trade. Guns and drugs aren’t often connected in our heated discussions of gun control - but they should be. In Ioan Grillo’s groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, he shows us this connection by following the market for guns in the Americas and how it has made the continent the most murderous on earth.

In A Nuclear Family Vacation, husband-and-wife journalists Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger hit the road to explore the secretive world of nuclear weaponry. Weaving together first-class travel writing and crack investigative journalism, the pair pursues both adventures and answers: Why are nuclear weapons still on hair-trigger alert? Is there really such a thing as a suitcase nuke? And which nuclear power plants are most likely to be covers for weapons programs?

In the United States today, one in every 31 adults is under some form of penal control, including one in 11 African American men. How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America's prison problem originated with the Reagan administration's War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

The National Rifle Association is unique in American life. Few other civic organizations are as old or as large. None is as controversial. It is largely due to the NRA that the US gun policy differs so extremely - some would say so tragically - from that of every other developed nation. But, as Frank Smyth shows, the NRA has evolved from an organization concerned above all with marksmanship - and which supported most government efforts around gun control for a hundred years - to one that resists all attempts to restrict guns in any way.

America is under attack. Its institutions and values are under daily assault. But the principal culprits are not foreign terrorists. They are influential and powerful Americans secretly stirring up disunion and disloyalty in the shifting shadows of the Democratic Party. Radical infiltrators have been quietly transforming America's societal, cultural, and political institutions for more than a generation. Now, backed by George Soros, they are ready to make their move.

Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet. Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. Game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion.

Number-one best-selling author and radio host Glenn Beck exposes the real truth behind the roots of Islamic extremism in Muslim teaching in this sharply insightful audiobook that debunks commonly held assumptions about Islam and the dream of a renewed caliphate.

Three decades after Khomeinist thugs raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Westerners are puzzled by Iran. As a nation, Iranians still like the United States. As a revolutionary regime, however, Iran is the principal bastion of anti-Americanism. From Ayatollah Khomeini's "historic mission" to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's messianic campaign in the name of the "Hidden Imam," The Persian Night depicts a trajectory that will most likely lead to war.

In Dangerous Ground, Scott Ritter, one of the world's leading experts on arms control, tells a bold and revisionist account of the inseparable histories of the post-World War II American presidency and nuclear weapons. Unpacking 60 years of nuclear history, Ritter shows that nuclear weapons have become such a fixture that they define present-day America on economic, military, political, and moral grounds.

Finance plays a key role in the prosperity of the modern world—but it also brings grave dangers. We seek to manage those threats with a vast array of sophisticated mathematical tools and techniques of financial risk management. Too often, though, we fail to address the greatest risk—the peril posed by our own behavior. Jon Danielsson argues that critical risk is generated from within, through the interactions of individuals and perpetuated by their beliefs, objectives, abilities, and prejudices.

Who gets to control the media we consume? Can we intervene, or at least mitigate the influence of constant content? Mixing personal anecdotes with historical and political criticism, Image Control explores art, social media, photography, and other visual mediums to understand how our culture and our actions are manipulated, all the while building toward the idea that if fascism emerges as aesthetics, then so too can anti-fascism.

Based on a review of research literature from sociology, organizational psychology, and behavioral economics, this audiobook develops a theory of consent generation and distinguishes three groups of consent-producing mechanisms: socialization, incentive mechanisms, and participation and interest representation.

By bridging Marxism and deconstructionism, this essay proves how Orwell's 1984 parallels the modern-day complacency among Americans. Typically, most will point out the obvious similarities like constant surveillance through screens (phones, televisions, computers), the ever-increasing wage gap between the rich and poor, and the creation of new laws that interfere with our constitutional freedoms.