Enemies of You Series
Most commentary tells you the system is broken. The Enemies of You series names the specific forces doing the breaking, how each one operates, and what a clear-thinking person does about it.
Eight books. Eight forces working against you and the country you live in. Some come from outside: private equity hollowing out the businesses you depend on, information operations run by hostile states, an industrial base too thin to defend itself. Some come from inside: the slow surrender of your own thinking to the machine, the hours handed to an algorithm, the snap judgments you make without noticing. Each book names one enemy clearly, traces exactly how it works, and lays out the rational response.
These are not self-help books and they are not doom. Every one of them documents the people and communities that refused to go along, because the counter-examples exist and their existence proves none of it was inevitable. Read one or read all eight. Either way, you will recognize things you wish you had seen sooner.
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Stuck in the Middle: Wars, Weapons, the Next Thirty Years
Connects cognitive decline, civic collapse, military overreach, and geopolitical competition into one structural argument about the next thirty years. -
The Birth of the Augmented Human
The Death of Thinking mapped the problem. This book maps the other path — the practices that maintain cognitive capacity and what they build over time. -
The Death Of Thinking
What happens when you consistently outsource your thinking to AI? Documents that pattern — its causes, costs, and what gets lost before you notice. -
The Emasculation of America
A national security argument. Documents the sixty-year Soviet operation to target American masculinity and degrade national capacity. Not a culture war book. -
The Enshittification of America
How private equity transformed American commerce from serving customers to extracting value. Thirteen industries documented. The playbook never changes. -
The Villainization of America
America's failures are real. This documents the operation that uses them to build a permanent indictment — who built it, who funds it, what it costs. -
Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something
Four hours of TV a day, no time for what matters. Richard Lowe's guide to crossing the line from consuming to contributing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Eight books on the specific forces working against you and the society you live in, some external and some internal. Most obstacles get described in vague terms. This series names each one clearly, explains how it operates, and gives you concrete ground to stand on. The forces range from private equity and information warfare to the erosion of your own attention and judgment. Read one or read all eight. Either way, you will recognize things you wish you had seen sooner.
Yes, and most people can’t see it happening. The Death of Thinking tracks what occurs when practitioners consistently outsource the parts of their work that require genuine thinking. Not in one session. Over months and years of daily decisions that remove the cognitive demands that were building something. The writer who stopped staring at the blank page because the AI eliminated the need. The programmer who could no longer explain why the system was built the way it was, because the why had never fully been his. Each decision looked reasonable. The pattern is not. The book maps what that pattern produces and where it leads, with an honest account of what can be done about it.
You form your own position first, then bring in the AI. The Birth of the Augmented Human describes what this looks like in practice: the writer who drafts a rough paragraph before asking the AI anything, the programmer who sits with the logs long enough to form a hypothesis before running the diagnostic tool. The AI arrives after something exists that you made. It challenges, refines, and stress-tests what you built. It doesn’t build it. That sequence is the difference between using AI as a force multiplier and using it as a replacement for your own judgment. The compound return on getting that sequence right is enormous. Getting it wrong is invisible until the day the hard problem arrives and you have nothing to bring to it.
Stop being an audience member. Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something makes one argument: every platform you use has a consuming side and a contributing side. On the consuming side, you are the product. On the contributing side, you use the same tools to produce something real. The screen doesn’t change. Your relationship to it does. The book is not about giving things up. It’s about redirecting a thousand hours a year from the algorithm’s plan to yours. One change made and held beats ten changes planned and abandoned.
More serious than the public debate acknowledges. Stuck in the Middle uses the 2026 Iran war as a stress test: within a week, American ships were burning through missile stockpiles faster than the defense industry could replace them. Iran was building the ballistic missiles those interceptors were designed to kill for a few hundred thousand dollars apiece. The US could manufacture six or seven interceptors in the same period Iran produced ninety. The fleet is the smallest it has been in over a century and is still shrinking. The industrial base was built for peacetime procurement, not wartime surge. This book connects those failures to the demographic, resource, and geopolitical forces that make the next thirty years the most dangerous period the country has faced.
It turned them into extraction operations. The Enshittification of America documents the playbook across thirteen industries: identify a profitable business with loyal customers, buy it with borrowed money, load the business with the debt used to purchase it, then strip out everything that made it worth buying. The airlines, the department stores, the newspapers, the hospitals, the pharmacies. Not mismanaged. Deliberately hollowed. The people running these operations know exactly what they’re doing, and now they’re doing it with algorithms. The book also covers who resisted and why, because the counter-examples exist and their existence proves none of this was inevitable.
Because they were targeted. The Emasculation of America is a national security argument, not a culture war argument. The United States Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers in 2022. Seven million prime-age men have permanently left the workforce. Male testosterone has declined roughly one percent per year for decades. Boys are failing in school at historically unprecedented rates. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov described the Soviet strategy for producing exactly these outcomes in a 1984 interview. Russia’s Internet Research Agency updated the playbook for social media. China built TikTok to deliver different content to American and Chinese youth, by design. The book names the actors, documents the operations, and describes what the men and communities that refused to go along with it look like.
Criticism is not the problem. The Villainization of America draws one line most people aren’t drawing: reckoning and villainization are not the same operation. Reckoning names what went wrong and points toward repair. Villainization names what went wrong and declares the whole project irredeemable. The first produces citizens who understand their country’s failures and work to address them. The second produces residents with no particular stake in whether the institutions survive. The book documents who built the villainization machinery, who funds it, who amplifies it from outside the country, and what it costs when a nation loses the capacity to tell its own story honestly. The history of real failures belongs in the account. What this book disputes is using those failures to foreclose the possibility that any of it was worth anything.
No, and that belief is part of the problem. Everybody’s Prejudiced makes its case by going first: the author puts his own inherited prejudices on the table before asking the reader to examine theirs. The childhood fears that were handed to him, the categories he never tested until a specific person demolished them, the biases he still catches himself running. The argument is that snap judgment by category is universal human wiring, and it points in every direction at once. White, male, Christian, working-class, disabled, old, veteran, every group both holds prejudice and absorbs it. Pretending you are the exception is how the bias operates unchecked. The book separates the automatic judgment everyone makes from what a rational person does next: notice it, question it, and refuse to act on it. The first is wiring. The second is a choice, and the work of making that choice produces real results.