Not Free America is a call to all Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms and break free of “our abusive relationship with our government.” Mike Donovan’s groundbreaking work on behalf of personal liberties has made him an object of fascination on both the Right and the Left. In this groundbreaking book, Mike Donovan, the CEO of Nexus Services, calls out the elites who wield power in our country—not only the elites at the federal level, but the elites who exert control over us in our states and counties, our cities and towns. Not Free America is a passionate call to all freedom-loving Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms and break free of what he calls “our abusive relationship with our government.” Donovan details how the “wholesale shredding of the Bill of Rights” started long before the concurrent crises of Covid-19 and the protests and violence that followed the murder of George Floyd. Not Free America shows us how those events were used by forces in our local, state, and federal governments that had systematically been abridging our rights for decades. These rights, Mike reminds us, are God-given rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. As the pastor of the First Christian Church Universalist in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Mike Donovan is far from your quiet country clergyman. A fierce warrior with the spirit of God and the tough skin of a lawyer, he has dedicated his life to protecting liberty and preserving individual rights, serving the underserved, and ministering to those who are overlooked in our broken society. Indeed, there are aspects to his past and present that make him an easy target for judgment from all directions. But Mike Donovan hides from nothing: He openly embraces the faults of his past and dedicates his present to creating a future that helps others move past their own unfortunate pasts. Born to a poor family in Page County, Virginia, he found himself at a young age convicted of writing bad checks, resulting in multiple felonies for which he served seven months in the county jail. But the time he served didn’t break him; it helped make him the man he is today: a man of the law and a man of God who believes with all his heart and soul in the possibility of redemption and the power of moving beyond past mistakes. He also came out of that experience knowing he needed to make a difference for others who found themselves in the same place he’d just been. Not content to talk the talk, Mike Donovan walks the walk in the footsteps of the Jesus who said “I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.” Not Free America shows us how to do all that for America and for our children. The book ends with “The Liberty Pledge”: an agreement readers will make stating that they will vote only for lawmakers who agree to uphold the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

In a stinging dissent to a 1961 Supreme Court decision that allowed the Illinois state bar to deny admission to prospective lawyers if they refused to answer political questions, Justice Hugo Black closed with the memorable line, "We must not be afraid to be free." Black saw the First Amendment as the foundation of American freedom - the guarantor of all other Constitutional rights. Yet since free speech is by nature unruly, people fear it. Consequently, the impulse to curb or limit it has been a constant danger throughout American history. In We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free, two of America's leading free speech scholar-activists, Ron Collins and Sam Chaltain, provide an authoritative history of free speech in modern America. Each chapter is an engaging narrative account of a landmark First Amendment case that foregrounds the colorful people involved-judges, plaintiffs, attorneys, defendants-and the issue at stake. Cumulatively, the chapters provide a definitive account of how the First Amendment evolved over the course of a century. Tracing the development of free speech rights from a more restrictive era-the early twentieth century-through the Warren Court revolution of the 1960s and up to the current post 9/11 era of heightened security concerns, Collins and Chaltain not only cover the history of an ideal, but explain in accessible language how the law surrounding the ideal transformed. Essential for anyone interested in this most essential of rights, We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free will be a standard work on free speech for years to come.

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.

The Plot to Change America exposes the myths that help identity politics perpetuate itself. This book reveals what has really happened, explains why it is urgent to change course, and offers a strategy to do so. Though we should not fool ourselves into thinking that it will be easy to eliminate identity politics, we should not overthink it, either. Identity politics relies on the creation of groups and then on giving people incentives to adhere to them. If we eliminate group making and the enticements, we can get rid of identity politics. The first myth that this book exposes is that identity politics is a grassroots movement, when from the beginning it has been, and continues to be, an elite project. For too long, we have lived with the fairy tale that America has organically grown into a nation gripped by victimhood and identitarian division; that it is all the result of legitimate demands by minorities for recognition or restitutions for past wrongs. The second myth is that identity politics is a response to the demographic change this country has undergone since immigration laws were radically changed in 1965. Another myth we are told is that to fight these changes is as depraved as it is futile, since by 2040, America will be a minority-majority country, anyway. This book helps to explain that none of these things are necessarily true.

Not Free America is a call to all Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms and break free of “our abusive relationship with our government.” Mike Donovan’s groundbreaking work on behalf of personal liberties has made him an object of fascination on both the Right and the Left. In this groundbreaking book, Mike Donovan, the CEO of Nexus Services, calls out the elites who wield power in our country—not only the elites at the federal level, but the elites who exert control over us in our states and counties, our cities and towns. Not Free America is a passionate call to all freedom-loving Americans to take back our constitutional freedoms and break free of what he calls “our abusive relationship with our government.” Donovan details how the “wholesale shredding of the Bill of Rights” started long before the concurrent crises of Covid-19 and the protests and violence that followed the murder of George Floyd. Not Free America shows us how those events were used by forces in our local, state, and federal governments that had systematically been abridging our rights for decades. These rights, Mike reminds us, are God-given rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. As the pastor of the First Christian Church Universalist in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Mike Donovan is far from your quiet country clergyman. A fierce warrior with the spirit of God and the tough skin of a lawyer, he has dedicated his life to protecting liberty and preserving individual rights, serving the underserved, and ministering to those who are overlooked in our broken society. Indeed, there are aspects to his past and present that make him an easy target for judgment from all directions. But Mike Donovan hides from nothing: He openly embraces the faults of his past and dedicates his present to creating a future that helps others move past their own unfortunate pasts. Born to a poor family in Page County, Virginia, he found himself at a young age convicted of writing bad checks, resulting in multiple felonies for which he served seven months in the county jail. But the time he served didn’t break him; it helped make him the man he is today: a man of the law and a man of God who believes with all his heart and soul in the possibility of redemption and the power of moving beyond past mistakes. He also came out of that experience knowing he needed to make a difference for others who found themselves in the same place he’d just been. Not content to talk the talk, Mike Donovan walks the walk in the footsteps of the Jesus who said “I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.” Not Free America shows us how to do all that for America and for our children. The book ends with “The Liberty Pledge”: an agreement readers will make stating that they will vote only for lawmakers who agree to uphold the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment.

No event in American history was more pivotal-or more furiously contested-than Congress's decision to declare independence in July 1776. Even months after American blood had been shed at Lexington and Concord, many colonists remained loyal to Britain. John Adams, a leader of the revolutionary effort, said bringing the fractious colonies together was like getting "thirteen clocks to strike at once." Other books have been written about the Declaration, but no author has traced the political journey from protest to Revolution with the narrative scope and flair of John Ferling. Independence takes readers from the cobblestones of Philadelphia into the halls of Parliament, where many sympathized with the Americans and furious debate erupted over how to deal with the rebellion. Independence is not only the story of how freedom was won, but how an empire was lost. At this remarkable moment in history, high-stakes politics was intertwined with a profound debate about democracy, governance, and justice. John Ferling, drawing on a lifetime of scholarship, brings this passionate struggle to life as no other historian could. Independence will be hailed as the finest work yet from the author Michael Beschloss calls "a national resource."