Morning Joe

We shared a love of the Chip Hilton sports books because the great coach Claire B. who wrote them had been one of Bob Knight's mentors.

He has a new book out entitled The Hollow Crown Shakespeare on how leaders rise, rule and fall. And that's out today.

There's a place for geopolitical and strategic analysis of Israel's war with Hamas and its allies and associates, how it affects politics in the Gulf, whether it will reduce American aid to Ukraine, how Russia may exploit the situation and so forth. But such discussion will miss an essential element of this war, a conflict that is not solely or even primarily about politics or desperately conceived purpose. It's about barbarism.

Barbarians fight because they enjoy violence. They do not only kill and maim, but go out of their way to inflict pain, to torture, to rape and above all, to humiliate. They exalt in their enemy's suffering. That is why they like taking pictures of their weeping, terrified victims, why they make videos of slow beheadings and why they dance around mutilated corpses.

All of us, not just Israelis and Ukrainians are in The Fight of Our Lives. And it is about time we recognized that and acted with the vigor and courage the times demand.

So I was looking around at what Rothbard wrote, and I found a piece from 1992 called Right Wing Populism, a strategy for the paleo movement.

The paperback edition of The Divider is out now.

Susan and I wrote, The Divider, is we thought it was a work of history, but it turns out to be a work of prologue.

The New Yorkers Susan Glasser and Peter Baker of The New York Times, thank you both very much for being on this morning.

They're co-authors of the 2022 book, The Divider, Trump in the White House, 2017 to 2021, which is now available in paperback.

Russell's also the author of the new book, Losing Our Religion, An Alter Call for Evangelical America.

The new book is titled Losing Our Religion, an Altered Call for Evangelical America.

Defectors, how the illicit flight of Soviet citizens built the borders of the Cold War world.

Well, thank you very much. So, defection is an unusual thing. When we typically think about migrants fleeing, we think of the way that people are prevented from entering countries by borders.

But Defectors were people who fled illegally, who fled countries that had exit controls, essentially criminalizing their exit.

And so, defection was jointly produced by this criminalization of exit and this encouragement of escape.

And the book looks at defection around the world, not only in border zones along states, but also on the high seas, around embassies, aboard airplanes.

This weekend, I reread Paul Johnson's Napoleon, which came out in 2002, part of his series of brief lives. Johnson writes of the cult of Napoleon in a way that is now pertinent.

The cult of Bonaparte was originally wide, but it did not last. It had power in the moment, but it passed. Reality settled in history, made its judgments. The cultists changed the subject or added nuance when pressed to explain their previous support.

I like to get Let There Be Light by John Meacham.

Mike Lupica, thank you so much for being with us and coming up. We're going to have the latest on the downbreak in Ukraine that's flooding the front lines and how it could impact the war for weeks to come. Also, Prince Harry becomes the first senior royal to testify in court in more than a century. We'll tell you why I had a morning job. MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell. Mike Lupica, thank you so much for being with us and coming up. We should mention Mike has another book coming out. He writes books like I drink sweet tea. It's just that easy for him. He's got another bestselling book out with James Patterson titled Twelve Months to Live. I mean, this thing's sure like all the others go to the top of top of the list. It's due out this September.

If you read The Closing of the American Mind and the intro by Alan Bloom in 1986, in 1986.

If you read Harold Bloom's introduction to The Western Canon in 1986, he was daring the progressive left, the extremists to try to cancel Shakespeare.

And he's the author of the new book, Party of One, The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future.

All right. The new book is Party of One, The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future.

John Gans, author of When the Clock Broke, Conmen, Conspiracists and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

We spent about 15 years thinking that Putin was the judo master who could simply hold all the reins of power in his own hands and deploy that power very skillfully to get what he wanted.

He was able to do that in a few small conflicts, but he's fallen flat on his face. This one, he underestimated the degree of Ukrainian resistance. He underestimated the degree to which his aggression would unite the West and bring forth a very powerful response.

And he surely underestimated the degree to which this conflict would drag down Russian power, not just in the present, but for years to come.

One more book, if you haven't read it, if you're reading on those first World War books, if you haven't read Sleepwalking, I think it's a really good book to read at this particular moment.

And I think it's worth revisiting that particular--you're right, that's the moment in history to revisit at the moment.

And that's actually the book I'm in the middle of, and I was told you have to read this book first. It's extraordinary.

Yeah, it's a good one.

Mark, you've spent a lot of time covering Fox News. You've written about Fox News in your most recent book as well.