Unshackling Democracy

Embracing Term Limits, Empowering Citizens

It is time to cease business as usual in Washington, and Gerrick Wilkins sees the solution right in front of us. 

Wilkins asserts the time is now to limit how long members of the U.S. Congress can serve—to counter the corrupting culture of political careerism with fresh ideas and innovation and to encourage the kind of “citizen legislature” the founders of our republic dreamed of.

Unshackling Democracy highlights this conviction and brings new light on an issue that has been debated and deferred much too long. With engaging storytelling and well-researched history, Wilkins provides a fresh look at term limits. A highly successful dealer and consultant in the automobile industry, Wilkins sees professional politicians and elite policymakers who ignore or misunderstand the perspectives of ordinary Americans—those who create businesses and make up the workforce, struggle to make paychecks stretch farther, and are committed to better lives for their children.

Wilkins chose to make a congressional run when the elected official in his district reneged on his commitment not to seek re-election after five terms. Wilkins believes that term limits would encourage stronger involvement in the political process. He believes this book will motivate citizens to take back the reins of power from the hands of career politicians and restore it to the American people—where it was always meant to be.

The Purple Presidency 2024

How Voters Can Reclaim the White House for Bipartisan Governance

For decades, partisan gridlock and a drift toward the extremes in Washington have left Americans with only two choices—red or blue, neither reflecting most Americans’ views.

Voters feel helpless and often end up voting against the greater of two evils, casting protest votes, or not voting at all. This crisis peaked with the elections of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the least popular presidents since polling began. The 2022 midterms only confirmed voters’ dissatisfaction with both extremes.

In 2024, with independent voters outnumbering either party, we have reached a tipping point—it’s time for a purple wave to elect a pragmatic president who will reject polarization and represent mainstream America.

In The Purple Presidency 2024, C. Owen Paepke reveals how we came to this desperate point in history, the perils of remaining on this path, and how a nonpartisan voters’ movement can take back Washington.

Kissinger’s Betrayal

How America Lost the Vietnam War

What really happened in Vietnam?

For five decades, conventional wisdom about the Vietnam War has been that it was lost because it never could have been won. South Vietnam was doomed to defeat. The American effort was a foreign intrusion forever incapable of winning the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese people.

But what if South Vietnam was defeated not because of its own shortcomings but because it was betrayed by a secret deal made behind its back? 

Deeply researched and compellingly argued, Kissinger’s Betrayal uses once-secret files of the American ambassador to South Vietnam and long-overlooked documents from official government archives—including the foreign ministry of the Soviet Union—to reveal for the first time how Henry Kissinger personally and secretly schemed to irrevocably compromise South Vietnam’s chances for survival.

Without informing his president, other American leaders, or US allies in South Vietnam, Kissinger unilaterally made a horrendous—and ultimately completely unnecessary—diplomatic concession that allowed Communist North Vietnam to leave its army inside South Vietnam and then freely resume its war of invasion and conquest at a time of its own choosing.

In an unprecedented account, historian and global executive director of the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism Stephen B. Young provides new insight into both genuine Vietnamese Nationalism and the French colonialism that marginalized and decentered the right of the Vietnamese people to live freely in an independent country of their own choosing.

Kissinger’s Betrayal reveals a fresh and more truthful history of the Vietnam War that restores dignity to America as well as the people of Vietnam.

Branding Democrats

A Top-to-Bottom Reimagining of Campaign Strategies

Democrats, stop whining and start winning! 

Democrats are terrible at branding. 

Political branding isn’t about logos, slogans, or messages. It’s also not about individual candidates and campaigns. 

It’s about what Democrats stand for and are known for in the minds of voters. It’s how voters feel about the party over years, or even decades. 

Today the Democrats’ brand is in shambles. And that is costing us elections. 

This practical, easy-to-read guide outlines the branding blunders Democrats continually make and delivers specific steps the party can take to turn things around. 

The need could not be more urgent. Our democracy is at stake. Let’s build the new Democratic brand, together.

Branding Democrats

A Top-to-Bottom Reimagining of Campaign Strategies

Democrats, stop whining and start winning! 

Democrats are terrible at branding. 

Political branding isn’t about logos, slogans, or messages. It’s also not about individual candidates and campaigns. 

It’s about what Democrats stand for and are known for in the minds of voters. It’s how voters feel about the party over years, or even decades. 

Today the Democrats’ brand is in shambles. And that is costing us elections. 

This practical, easy-to-read guide outlines the branding blunders Democrats continually make and delivers specific steps the party can take to turn things around. 

The need could not be more urgent. Our democracy is at stake. Let’s build the new Democratic brand, together.

Our Common Ground

Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters

For four years, Diane Hessan has been in weekly conversation with voters across the United States. What she has learned will surprise you, enlighten you, give you hope, and change the way you think about your fellow Americans.

Our inability to hear each other, our suspicion, and our impatience is stressing us out and tearing us apart. It’s a sickness that permeates the American culture, erodes our collective mental health, and makes us hate each other.

To gain insight into how we can move forward, Hessan undertook a massive listening project, conducting an ongoing series of weekly interviews with 500 voters from every state, of every age and ethnicity, and along different points of the political spectrum. The topics ranged from race to guns, from character to party politics, from masks to rallies, from the Supreme Court to the pandemic to immigration and climate change. After more than a million individual communications, two things became clear:

We have more common ground than we realize.

And we are, sadly, failing at understanding each other.

On issue after issue, our “divided” nation isn’t nearly as polarized as we imagine. An overwhelming majority of voters believe in commonsense gun licensing and regulation. They are pro-immigration. They believe climate change is real and the coronavirus is deadly. They care deeply about their families and are willing to work hard to make ends meet. And, they believe that Washington is slow, bureaucratic, and not working in their best interests.

In dozens of columns on these topics published in the Boston Globe, Hessan has upended common political wisdom. Presented together for the first time as part of this book, they reveal a unique perspective on how Americans actually think, what they value, and how we can move forward.

The path to healing our divided nation is both simple and profound. We must turn down the heat. We must begin to listen, to stop presuming, to try to understand, to treat each other with dignity, and to know that most Americans are not crazy radicals. We truly share common ground. If we can pull together, we can have a much better America.

Speaking While Female

75 Extraordinary Speeches by American Women

This monumental collection of speeches charts the story of America as it unfolded through the decades, showing that at every critical juncture, women were speaking. It’s a long-needed corrective to the story we have always told ourselves about whose ideas and voices shaped the nation—a search for long-buried truths, a celebration, and an inspiration.

The Healthcare Labyrinth

A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance

The Healthcare Labyrinth is not just a comprehensive guide to navigating health plans – it offers a blueprint for fixing our broken healthcare system.

The American health insurance system is anything but easy to maneuver. Health plan enrollees are entangled in a maze of confusion, often resulting in regret, frustration, and deep debt.

In The Healthcare Labyrinth, health plan and healthcare technology veteran Marc S. Ryan demystifies the U.S. healthcare system, helping Americans become wiser consumers and allowing them to navigate the maze with more clarity.

Marc walks through how the system operates, tracing the dysfunction, high costs, and lack of quality to three core issues:

• a lack of affordable universal access;
• little focus on wellness, prevention, and care management; and
• outrageous pricing, especially compared to other developed nations.

Using his decades of experience, Marc outlines a bipartisan blueprint to transform America’s unique system without dismantling the employer-based system. He relies on leading academic, research, and mainstream media sources from across the political spectrum to examine the U.S. healthcare system and compare it to those of other developed nations.

The New Civil War

Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America

We are living through a national trauma. The United States has jettisoned the rule of law and ceased functioning as a republic. Battle lines have been drawn. Progressives are moving quickly to cement their transformation of the country’s beliefs, attitudes, values, social structures, economic models, and government organizations. Patriotic Americans are waking up to recognize that conservatism failed to conserve much of anything. Progressives control academia, media, the civil service, and several of our country’s most important industries.

Americans who support the constitution have become counterrevolutionaries. Their challenge is nothing short of the restoration of America’s institutions. Such a restoration is achievable, but you can’t defeat what you don’t understand. Every good restorationist must study progressivism: where it originated, how it grew, what it preaches, how it operates, and what it hopes to accomplish. The New Civil War provides that understanding. It exposes the mechanisms progressives have used over the course of decades to seduce millions of decent, well-intentioned Americans into a dangerously anti-American movement. More importantly, it maps out a nonviolent strategy for an effective restoration.

The New Civil War is not a call for war. It is a recognition that war has been declared on us. Our sacred love of liberty is under attack. Unless we defend it, the America we love may be lost. This book is for every patriotic American eager to defeat the utopian left—and restore America.

The Horseshoe Virus

How the Anti-Immigration Movement Spread from Left-Wing to Right-Wing America

From former Arizona state senator Bob Worsley comes a groundbreaking book that sheds disturbing light on the history of anti-immigration movements in America.

Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070—known to be one of the most sweeping and strict anti-immigration state laws passed in the United States—caused tremendous upheaval in Bob Worsley’s religious community in Mesa, Arizona. Deeply troubled by the blatantly racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric swirling in public political discourse, Worsley ran for state senator in 2012 against the previous Senate president and author of SB 1070, and won.

A three-term state senator, Worsley approached much of his political career with a commonsense approach to conservative leadership, balancing justice and compassion with every decision he made.

Unspooling three fascinating storylines, The Horseshoe Virus recounts Worsley’s unlikely political run, unpacks the political targeting immigrants throughout American history have faced, and draws surprising anti-immigration links between key players on both sides of the aisle, including nineteenth and twentieth century eugenicists, liberal reformers, actual racists, and wealthy power brokers.

Worsley focuses on John Tanton, the mastermind of the modern anti-immigration movement. Worsley tracks Tanton’s transformation from a radical, pro-abortion environmentalist to a white nationalist whose network of anti-immigration organizations dominates the Trump administration’s policies and leadership.

Worsley’s exploration of Tanton’s persuasions demonstrates how far-left activists shape strategies of the far-right’s immigration positions. It’s the virulent spread of these ideas that Worsley calls the Horseshoe Virus—a plague of nationalism, racism, and hate that is shared by subgroups on both ends of the political spectrum.

Exploring various political vaccines for the virus, including the SANE policy for immigration reform, and, ultimately, political change that must occur at the ballot box, Worsley outlines a new path forward that will inspire hope and unity between new and old Americans.