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Praising someone for being “politically incorrect” has, alas, become a tiresome cliché. That’s a shame, because we need eloquent critics of that pernicious worldview now more than ever. Yet we toss the phrase “politically incorrect” around as easily as a Nerf ball, and thereby render it about as effective.

So when I call Jamie Glazov’s new book United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror “politically incorrect,” please refrain from hitting your mental snooze button.

United in Hate will remind many of Paul Johnson’s seminal Intellectuals. Reading that 1988 book has been an eye-opening experience for many budding conservatives. A month ago, a young man I’d just met excitedly shared his latest used-bookstore discovery: Intellectuals, that anti-hagiography of modernity’s liberal heroes, the ones that same young man had been taught to revere by his professors. You could see the glow of intellectual liberation in his eyes. His eagerness to discover and share even more “unspeakable” truths was palpable.

“What’s important about Intellectuals,” observed “libertarian bookworm” Timothy Sandefur, “is that it reveals the extent to which the ideological ‘leaders’ of modern culture have been willing to lie, cheat, and steal — literally — in the pursuit of anti-rational modern ideologies like socialism, communism, and the regulatory welfare state.”

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