Olasky Books: Wars without mercy

“A fine book to carry to the barricades.” That’s how Kirkus Reviews praised Bummerland: Ruin and Restoration in Trump’s New America by American Studies Professor Randolph Lewis (U. of Nebraska Press, 2026). But is this what we’ve come to in America: Teaching students and readers that the whole country is “a woodchipper for the soul”?

Lewis plies his trade at The University of Texas at Austin, where I was a tenured professor. I still cheer for the Longhorns and don’t want government dictating curriculum, but reading Lewis’s characterization of America as “a dirty barge” leaves me sympathetic to attempts by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to rein in UT.

I’m also not thrilled by books at the other extreme like Seth Barron’s Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions (Humanix, 2026). But a Yale University report last month acknowledged estimates that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans among faculty nationwide by a margin of about 10 to 1. At Yale one 2025 estimate notes that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management.

The Yale report acknowledged a problem “when a campus becomes increasingly uniform in any respect—including in its ideological or political orientation.” So, starting this fall “each department and school should engage in a self-study examining… the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.” But self-study by many who are self-satisfied rarely leads to change, which means pressure will have to come from the outside.

Yale students and others would benefit by reading new Discovery Institute books that challenge evolutionary theory on both the facts and their implications. Ultimate Engineering by Stuart Burgess shows how our body biomechanics are advanced beyond what survival of the fittest suggests. John West’s Endowed by Our Creator shows what happens when leaders forget that God made us equal and gave us unalienable rights.

Students subjected to Marxist historical interpretations should read Red Dawn Over China: How Communism Conquered a Quarter of Humanity (Bloomsbury, 2026), which undermines the supposed saga of Chinese revolutionaries in the 1940s gaining popular support. Frank Dikötter shows how Communists combined brutal tactics with financial and military support from the Soviet Union. Some Americans saw Marxists as Robin Hoods and helped them gain a revolutionary victory that subjected hundreds of millions to ruthless dictators.

Revolutions, including our own, should be de-glamoured. In War Without Mercy (Osprey, 2025), Mark Lender and James Martin describe what they call “existential warfare”: Both patriots and loyalists thought the existence of what they held most dear (liberty, community, church) was at stake.

Since many students learn only about Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and the other big set pieces of the revolution (if they learn anything at all), the authors’ research into the hundreds of irregular battles that went on is a valuable corrective to the sanitized version sometimes offered by the left (which wants to make revolutions seem easy) and the right (which emphasizes patriotic heroism).

But the American Revolution was a civil war, and civil wars always have dark undersides. A War Without Mercy chapter about New Jersey shows that one county alone—Monmouth—had neighbor-against-neighbor raids that resulted in 142 deaths and more than a thousand casualties of other kinds, including shootings, beatings, kidnappings, “plunderings,” and more.

Hamas on October 7, 2023, used rape as a means of war, and Americans accused British soldiers of the same. Although Benjamin Franklin thought such stories too shocking to publicize, Congress published accounts of war crimes in New Jersey including “the lust and brutality of the soldiers in abusing of women [with] the most indecent treatment,” along with the “savage butchery of many who had submitted or were incapable of resistance.”

On a happier note, Wilfred McClay and Stuart Halpern’s Jewish Roots of American Liberty (Encounter, 2025) has sprightly chapters on “Why Everyone Loves Daniel,” how Elijah became “America’s favorite prophet,” and how David, Esther, Samson, Hagar, and the Liberty Bell became metaphors.

Briefly noted

In The 5 Questions for Ethical Decisions (Princeton, 2026), David W. Miller gives and explains the source, framework, and public language of ethical decision-making. He shows (as the subtitle beckons) How to Succeed Without Selling Your Soul. John Kasich’s Heaven Help Us: How Faith Communities Inspire Hope, Strengthen Neighborhoods, and Build the Future (Zondervan, 2025) by the former Ohio governor is a blast from an optimistic past. If Yale does want to change, maybe Plutarch’s How to Listen: An Ancient Guide to Learning from Others (Jeffrey Beneker translation, Princeton, 2026) should be assigned reading for every professor.

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