Brent Tantillo is an Assistant United States Attorney and Coordinator of the Southern District of Florida's Human Trafficking Task Force. Prior to coming to work at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami, Tantillo was Counsel and Legislative Assistant to Congressman Todd Akin of the Second District of Missouri. While working in the House of Representatives, Tantillo led the Judicial Accountability Working Group's Strategic Action Team. In relation to these duties, Tantillo assisted Congressman Akin in authoring the Judicial Conduct Act. Additionally, he helped build a grassroots coalition to pass in the House, the Pledge Protection Act of 2005. Previously, he was research fellow and deputy director of the Projects for Civil Justice Reform and International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute where he authored the End Demand for Sex Trafficking Act, and co-authored the Advance Democracy Act, The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2003 and 2005, and the North Korea Human Rights Act, among others. He is also founding president of the Texas Review Society, through which he is publisher of the Texas Education Review, the Austin Review, the Houston Review, Texaminer (Texas A&M), and the Bear Review (Baylor University). He was a contributing editor to Choosing the Right College (Eerdmans, 2001) and Start the Presses: A Handbook for Student Journalists (ISI Books, 2000), and served for two years as associate editor of Campus Magazine. His writings have appeared in The Washington Times, Newsmax, American Outlook, Insight Magazine, The National Law Journal, and The Los Angeles Daily Times, among others.
From 1996 to 2003, Tantillo was a government affairs consultant for Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, an international mining company; he has also worked as a political consultant for Houston mayoral candidate Orlando Sanchez, Congressman Ron Paul, Texas Republican Party Chairman Tom Pauken, and many others at the state and local level. He received a B.B.A. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. from the University of Houston. He is licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia. Tantillo co-founded the Democracy Project after leaving the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, where he was director of institutional advancement.
Winfield Myers is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. Before taking over at Campus Watch, he was managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine, a publication of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. The former CEO of Democracy Project, he has longstanding interests in higher education, American politics and culture, and foreign policy. Principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College, with an introduction by William Bennett (Eerdmans, 1998; 2001), he is also past editor of the ISI Study Guides to the Liberal Arts. He was formerly senior editor of the Intercollegiate Review and Campus Magazine and is author of a widely distributed pamphlet, “Asking the Right Questions in Choosing a College.”
His writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, The American Outlook, FrontPage Magazine, The Providence Journal, Insight Magazine, and the Texas Education Review, among other publications. Myers is a member of the Blog Board of Contributors to the Examiner Newspapers, where his columns appear occasionally. He has been a guest on scores of radio shows, including the BBC and Radio New Zealand, and has appeared on the Fox News Channel’s Fox and Friends, local Fox networks, Australian SBS TV, and PAX TV as an education expert. A graduate of Young Harris College and the University of Georgia, Myers attended graduate school in history at Tulane University and the University of Michigan and has taught the Great Books in the honors college at Michigan and European history at the universities of Michigan and Georgia and at Tulane University and Xavier University of Louisiana. He served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute until leaving to co-found Democracy Project. Winfield Myers lives in Wilmington, Delaware.
Dr. Candace de Russy is a nationally recognized writer and lecturer on education and cultural issues. A former college professor, she was appointed to the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Air Force Academy by President George W. Bush in 2002. She was a Member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York from 1995 until 2007. Dr. de Russy served on the SUNY Board's Executive Committee, chaired its Academic Standards Committee, and was a member of its Ad Hoc Committee on Charter Schools. Throughout a career that has had at its center a deep commitment to the improvement of elementary, secondary and higher education, Dr. de Russy has led efforts to raise academic standards, strengthen general education, promote school choice, and bring accountability and efficiency to the academy. She holds a doctorate in French from Tulane University, a Master of Arts from Middlebury College's Sorbonne-based program and a B.A. from St. Mary's Dominican College of New Orleans.
A former Trustee of Westchester Community College, Dr. de Russy is currently a member of the Trustees Council of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Independent Women's Forum. She is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics and other professional societies. A contributing editor at Crisis magazine, Dr. de Russy has been published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Post, City Journal, Academic Questions, Heterodoxy, The Women's Quarterly, and other publications. As an outspoken critic of the academic credentials of a college conference titled "Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom," Dr. de Russy was featured in a segment on 60 Minutes. She has also publicly criticized the lowering of academic standards in a variety of multicultural studies, regarding which she was interviewed on The O'Reilly Factor. She has been the subject of feature articles in the New York Times, Village Voice, and other publications. In the inaugural issue of Ms. Magazine she was described as a "woman to watch out for."
She previously served as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. Dr. de Russy was Executive Officer of the American Foundation for Resistance International, an organization which specialized in human rights abuses in the former Soviet Union. She was also a speaker on defense issues for the National Strategy Information Center. Dr. de Russy has delivered talks on a range of educational and cultural issues, taught a college seminar on "America and Historical Decline," and has commented on education for radio station WAMC in Central New York State.
Herbert I. London is the John M. Olin University Professor of Humanities at New York University, where he was responsible for creating the Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 1972 and was its dean until 1992. He is also the president of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank with headquarters in Indianapolis and offices there and in Washington, D.C. Dr. London is a graduate of Columbia University, 1960, and the recipient of a Ph.D. from New York University, 1966. He is also a tenured professor of Social Studies at New York University.
Dr. London is a noted social critic whose work has appeared in every major newspaper and journal in the country including such diverse publications as Commentary, National Review, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Washington Times, New York Magazine, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Orbis, Encounter, and Forbes. He is the author and editor of twenty books. In addition to Dr. London's television program, "Myths that Rule America," he created a 47 part C.B.S. series entitled "The American Character." He has been a guest lecturer on many major radio and television news programs and at colleges and universities and has appeared as co-host on the popular CNN program, "Crossfire."
He is the former chairman of the National Association of Scholars and is the erstwhile editor of Academic Questions. Dr. London is Executive producer of "Rodney King Incident." He is presently a syndicated columnist with Knight-Ridder and was formerly syndicated by Bridge News. He is a contributing editor for St. Croix Review, The Social Critic, and American Arts Quarterly and is the publisher of American Outlook, the quarterly journal of the Hudson Institute. Dr. London is listed in the Outstanding People of the 21st Century; Directory of Distinguished Americans; Who's Who in Education; Who's Who in the East; Men of Distinction; Who's Who in America, Kensington's National Registry of Who's Who and 2000 Outstanding Intellectuals of the 21st Century. He is a recipient of honorary degrees from the University of Aix-Marseille, 1983 and Grove City College, 1993. He has received a Presidential Citation from N.Y.U., is a recipient of the National Pro-Am Achievement Award, was the 1996 recipient of the Martin Luther King Award from the Congress of Racial Equality for Citizenship Achievement, was the 1997 recipient of the Jacques Maritain Society Award, was the first recipient of the Peter Shaw Award for his exemplary writing on higher education and American intellectual culture, was awarded the Templeton Honor Roll Award in 1997 as one of the nation's exemplary professors. In 2000, he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and in 2001 the American Jewish Congress Award.
In 1989, Dr. London was one of the Republican candidates for Mayor of New York City. In 1990 he was the Conservative Party Candidate for Governor of New York garnering more votes than any third party candidate in the state's history. In 1994 he was the Republican Party candidate for New York State Comptroller losing in a close election. He is currently on the Hudson Institute Board of Directors; the Board of Directors of the National Chamber Foundation; the Board of Directors of the International Transportation Systems; the Board of Trustees for Merrill Lynch Assets Management, the Board of Directors of the National Association for Industry-Education Cooperation, the Board of Trustees of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Inc., the Executive Advisory Board for the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York City Cultural Affairs Commission, and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. He formerly served on the Board of Governors at St. John's College and the Board of Overseers at the Center for Naval Analyses.
Wilfred M. McClay has been SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also Professor of History, since 1999. He has also taught at Georgetown University, Tulane University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Dallas, and is currently Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a member of the Society of Scholars at the James Madison Program of Princeton University. He was appointed in 2002 to the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (North Carolina, 1994), which won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history published in the years 1993 and 1994.
Among his other books is A Student’s Guide to U.S. History (ISI Books, 2001) and Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He is currently at work on a biographical study of the American sociologist David Riesman, which is under contract to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and is editing two collection of essays: Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, which features sixteen essays by American historians on changing American understandings of self and person; and a collection of his own essays entitled Pieces of a Dream: Historical and Critical Essays, to be published by Eerdmans. He held the Royden B. Davis Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University for the academic year 1998-99. Among his other awards, McClay was selected for inclusion on the 1997-98 Templeton Honor Rolls, awarded by the John Templeton Foundation for distinguished teaching and scholarship in American higher education. In addition, he has been the recipient of fellowship awards from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, the Howard Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, and the Danforth Foundation.
McClay is coeditor of Rowman and Littlefield’s book series entitled American Intellectual Culture, serves on the editorial boards of First Things, The Wilson Quarterly, The Public Interest, Society, American Quarterly, Touchstone, University Bookman, and Continuity, and is a frequent contributor to a wide variety of both scholarly and general-interest publications. He was educated at St. John’s College (Annapolis) and the Johns Hopkins University, where he received a Ph.D. in history in 1987.
Brady Creel is a writer-editor and media designer at Texas A&M University, where he is working on a Ph.D. in political rhetoric and communication. His research interest is presidential rhetoric and its relationship with the media, especially new media and blogs. Creel also earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in management from Texas A&M.
Creel was editor of A&M's daily student newspaper, The Battalion, in Fall 2001 and later was founding editor of Texaminer, a conservative political journal published by the Texas Review Society. He served as communications director for the Texas A&M College Republicans in 2002.
During summer 2003, Creel was a Dow Jones copyediting intern at the Houston Chronicle. He also completed internships at the Houston division of the FBI and the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the FDIC.
Active on the front lines of the struggle to help oppressed people achieve democracy in the Middle East, China, North Korea and beyond, Ambassador Mark Palmer brings an unusual set of skills, experiences, and passions to the task. Through the years of the Cold War and up to the present, he is one of the most respected foreign policy innovators inside and outside the U.S. Government. He served in policy positions in the State Department in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and first Bush administrations, including launching the National Endowment for Democracy. From the outside, he has worked with both the Clinton and present Bush Administrations, helping persuade them to initiate new democracy policies, including the Community of Democracies and abolishing the so-called Arab exception, for the first time promoting democracy in the Arab world.
He has practical experience inside dictatorships, working directly with dictators, and helping to oust them without a shot being fired. He lived for 11 years in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Hungary under the communists as a student and diplomat. He organized and participated in the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit as the State Department's top "Kremlinologist," and as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary helped persuade its last dictator to leave power. He has been active on China and the Middle East, recently, for example, as the founding board member of an organization to support the largest movement for change in China, and working to support the emergence of politically independent commercial television stations throughout the Arab world, including addressing a meeting on media and democracy for the region which was held in Qatar in April 2003.
From his days in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement as a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, through demonstrating in the streets of Budapest as ambassador, to marching with the students in Belgrade against Milosevic in 1996, he has witnessed and practiced the power of organized nonviolent force in achieving freedom and justice. As a successful venture capitalist and investor from 1990 to the present, and president of his own company, he also has realized the potential of business in the transition to democracy. He co-founded Central European Media Enterprises, which financed and launched the first national independent television stations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Ukraine with more than $600 million in investment. Finally, he is a recognized writer and advocate, having written speeches for six Secretaries of State and three Presidents, including as principal speechwriter for Henry Kissinger and co-author of Ronald Reagan's favorite speech, and as Vice Chairman of the Board of Freedom House, a frequent contributor to published appeals and policy statements, and participant in democracy programs in the United States and across the arc of dictatorships stretching from China, through the Middle East and Africa, on to Belarus and Cuba.
Bruce Kesler has for the past 15-years owned an employee benefits and individual’s planning consulting and brokerage firm, operating nationally, based in the San Diego area. His many earned credentials and deep technical knowledge in these areas, and abilities to tie them in to the practicalities and technicalities of corporate and personal tax, accounting and other regulations is based on his prior 15-years as a finance and business operations executive for Fortune 100 and multinational companies, including Crown-Zellerbach, ITT and Olivetti, and smaller natural resource, production and electronics companies.
Kesler’s undergrad education was at Brooklyn College of C.U.N.Y., graduating in 1968 with a major in Economics and minor in International Affairs. In 1965, Kesler was enraged by an anti-American handout. Brooklyn College (also known as the “little Red school house” from decades earlier reputation) held its first student elections since the 1930’s. Kesler entered as the sole “conservative”, not really knowing what that is but so-described by comparison to the other 30+ candidates, mostly various shades of far-left, and won for the next 3-years. Not realizing what he’d accomplished, but recognized by others, his mentors came largely from distinguished Freedom House members. Kesler led many pro-Vietnam activities during these years. For example, in 1967, he helped with the organization of New York City’s Support Our Men In Vietnam parade, the longest since World War II. In 1968, Kesler worked in the initial Nixon candidacy, resigning when in his stubborn idealism he felt not all there were so “pure.”
Believing in walking the talk, after graduating college, Kesler volunteered for the Marine Corps, as an enlisted Marine. He rose to Sergeant, probably due to his education rather than being John Wayne (and humbled by the truly professional Marines of then and today), serving in intelligence in Vietnam during 1969-70. Waiting to enter graduate school, in the Spring of 1971, Kesler again became enraged, this time by the one-sided mass media publicity given John Kerry and his tiny band of real and fake Vietnam veterans’ slanders against America and those who served in Vietnam. He quickly rounded up other Vietnam veterans and formed the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. The New York Times published his op-ed in early May, and more Vietnam vets flocked to the banner. Days before a June 1 press conference in D.C., a just released Vietnam veteran who had served in the same unit as Kerry, John O’Neill joined. Major media gave VVJP pretty straight and fair reporting. John Kerry and his band faded from view, and we all returned to building our lives.
Kesler’s graduate studies in organization and policy analysis at the University of Pennsylvania followed, also working as a researcher at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His article against blanket amnesty for deserters and draft evaders, originally in Freedom House’s Freedom at Issue was picked up for most of a page in the Los Angeles Times, to Kesler’s amusement only half the space being given Jean Paul Sartre’s opposite view.
Kesler stayed out of politics during the next 30-years, except for helping organize a local Jewish Republican club during the mid-90’s. In 2004, Kesler, John O’Neill and other Vietnam veterans were again enraged by John Kerry’s false self-hagiography, and re-upped to finish the job of confronting John Kerry. Kesler published many articles during the campaign, recapping the effort in an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Revolt of the Vietnam Veterans,” a campaign credited with Kerry’s defeat. Kesler’s columns regularly appear in the Augusta Free Press and other venues, like at Front Page Magazine. Kesler lives in Encinitas, California with wife Judith, 5-year old Jason (a cross between laid back Dean Martin and rebellious Steve McQueen) and baby Gavin (so far like Jerry Lewis, howling or laughing).
Jim’s professional career includes over thirty-five years in public accounting, commercial and investment banking, and investment portfolio consulting, primarily serving Texas businesses and non-profit institutions, including three years with a major national public accounting firm; over ten years as a commercial lender to companies in a broad range of industry groups; six years as chief executive officer of a major Houston bank; and fifteen years as managing principal of Windham Capital Advisory Services, a Registered Investment Advisor, and its predecessor firm.
He also publishes The Texas Pilgrim, a monthly letter of commentary on cultural and public policy issues, and has had board level experience in the banking, investment management, insurance, and venture capital industries, as well as leadership positions in local, regional, and statewide organizations.
He has been heavily involved with education over the past fifteen years as chairman of the Texas Association of Business; vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation; member of the Board of Regents, Stephen F. Austin State University; chairman of the Rodeo Institute for Teacher Excellence; chairman of Texas Business Leaders for Educational Choice; member of the State Board for Educator Certification; Director of the Texas Education Reform Caucus; and member of the Public Education Policy Task Force of the Governor’s Business Council.
A native of Livingston, Texas, he is a 1965 graduate of The University of Texas at Austin in Finance and Accounting and is a Certified Public Accountant and NASD Principal. He and his wife, Lela, live in Houston and have two grown daughters.
Paul McNellis is a member of the Society of Jesus (“Jesuits”) and has been teaching philosophy at Boston College since 2000. Previously he taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he was director of their program in political philosophy.
McNellis is a Minnesota native and the oldest of nine children. In 1968 he enlisted in the US Army. After being commissioned (OCS), he completed airborne, special forces, and ranger training and was then assigned to the Central Highlands of Vietnam as an adviser to South Vietnamese Army reconnaissance units (22 ARVN Division) and Montagnard Scout companies. He served in Pleiku, Kontum, and Binh Dinh provinces.
Shortly after completing his military service and returning to the US, he joined the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. (For purposes of this site, this is the Kesler connection.)
He returned to Vietnam in 1972 as a free-lance journalist but worked primarily for the Associated Press. He later worked as a television reporter in the US.
From 1974-75 he worked with Catholic Relief Services in Cambodia, leaving Phnom Penh a week before the Khmer Rouge occupied the city.
He finally completed his undergraduate studies at Cornell University in 1977, with a major in Southeast Asian History and Asian Studies. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1977 and was ordained in 1987. As a Jesuit, he studied at Fordham University, Boston College, the Gregorian University, Oxford University, and the University of Munich.
His academic areas of interest include political philosophy, ethics, the family, the common good, natural rights and natural law, just war theory, the nature of modernity, and the relation between philosophy and theology. His doctoral thesis was on “The Crisis of the Family and the Analogy of Gratitude.”
Phil Orenstein is a manufacturing manager and CNC programmer at Orics Industries Inc., a major global producer of automated food sealing and packaging systems based in Queens, NY. Formerly an adjunct lecturer of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing at Queensborough Community College and Farmingdale State University, he additionally worked on curriculum development, Web design, outreach, and advocacy for manufacturing technology education. Previous to that, after a brief stint in substitute teaching, he teamed up with a privately funded progressive education program, REACH (Reading and Education for All Children), delivering lessons on drug prevention, self-esteem and conflict resolution to hundreds of public and private school classrooms throughout New York City.
He graduated from Stonybrook University with a BA in Studio Art in 1971 and later on commenced his graduate work at Queens College Division of Education. He studied CAD/CAM and manufacturing technologies in various continuing education programs at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, and Queensborough Community College.
In the summer of 1968, Orenstein participated in the notorious anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention as a member of the Yippie Party (Youth International Party). Subsequently he joined the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), a Japan-based global Buddhist organization, United Nations NGO, and world peace movement. As a 30-year member, he made numerous pilgrimages to Japan and rose up the ranks to become a senior leader.
After witnessing systemic abuses within the SGI organization, Orenstein and some colleagues sought to institute democratic reforms. When their proposals backfired and they were dismissed from their leadership positions in 1999, Orenstein’s political and philosophical perspective took a complete 180 degree turn. He and some friends formed an advocacy group, Victorious America, Ltd to publicly remonstrate with the SGI. But after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, when their views became more hawkish, they chose to confine their efforts to influencing elected officials and swaying public opinion rather than trying to reform an intractable peace organization. One of the events sponsored by Victorious America was a rally in Washington, DC in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 2003 to rally mass support for our troops fighting in Iraq.
Orenstein has moved on to becoming actively involved in local New York City politics and academic reform. He and some colleagues have successfully lobbied state representatives to introduce legislation based on David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights, which are now bills pending in the New York State Senate (S6336) and Assembly (A10098).
Currently, Orenstein is a County Committeeman in the 24th AD in New York, on the Board of Directors of the Queens Village Republican Club, and supports local candidates for public office. He participates with ProtestWarrior in patriotic counter demonstrations. His writings have appeared in FrontPage Magazine, Students for Academic Freedom, Arutz Sheva, Israel Insider, Israel National News, Time-Compression Technologies, Modern Applications News, Machine Design, and others. He lives in Queens, New York with his wife, Alma.