Hey there and welcome back to Rootless, the show that tells you the truth and nothing but, even or especially, when the truth is hard to hear.

My guest today is the one and only Adam Bellow, a legendary book editor who worked for publishing houses like Doubleday and Harper Collins, edited books like The Bell Curve that shaped much

of the intellectual debate of the last four decades, and wrote an excellent book himself,

in praise of nepotism, a history of family enterprise from King David to George W. Bush.

And he's joining us today because book publishing, an industry that gave us not only giants like

Adam's father, Nobel laureate, Saul Bello,

but also Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud and Chaim Potak and Scyth and So Many Other Giants of American Letters

has been completely taken over by ideological zealots who despise the very idea at the core of American culture,

namely that a culture can only thrive

if and when it allows the free and unfettered exchange of ideas and shuns any attempt at censorship

blacklisting or other Soviet means of assuring that only approved positions are heard.

Don't believe me that this is the case in American book publishing now.

Let me tell you a little story. It's a story about a good friend of mine, a man I admire very

much. He's one of our most eloquent and most courageous philosophers and public intellectuals,

Bernard Henri Lively. When the entire world, moralists, abandoned the Kurds, Bernard spoke out on

their behalf. He spoke out

for the persecuted Christians of Nigeria, the embattled Armenians, the Muslim Uighurs being sent

to camps in China. He was bravely there on the front lines of Russia's bloody war in Ukraine

from day one, giving us three haunting films that bore witness to both the cruelty of Putin's army and the

resilience and grit of ordinary Ukrainians. And when he heard about Hamas's genocidal attack

in Israel on October 7th of last year, he took the first plane he could out of Paris, landed

in Israel on October 8, and was one of the very first journalists to report from the

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