to the extreme to smear the bearer of bad news." DiLorenzo has also spoken out in favor of the secession of the Confederate States of America, defending the right of these states to secede from an abolitionist perspective. DiLorenzo is critical of Alexander Hamilton's financial views, the concept of "implied powers" in the constitution, the existence of a federal bank, and the use of Keynesian economics to increase the national debt. DiLorenzo is critical of neoconservatism and endless military interventionism. He has also made the case about how the military does not protect the U.S. Books DiLorenzo's book The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War is a critical biography published in 2002. In a review published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, David Gordon described DiLorenzo's thesis: Lincoln was a "white supremacist" with no principled interest in abolishing slavery, and believed in a strong central government that imposed high tariffs and a nationalized banking system. He attributes the South's secession to Lincoln's economic policies rather than a desire to preserve slavery. Gordon quotes DiLorenzo: "slavery was already in sharp decline in the border states and the upper South generally, mostly for economic reasons". Writing for The Daily Beast, Rich Lowry described DiLorenzo's technique in this book as the following: "His scholarship, such as it is, consists of rummaging through the record for anything he can find to damn Lincoln, stripping it of any nuance or context, and piling on pejorative adjectives. In DiLorenzo, the Lincoln-haters have found a champion with the judiciousness and the temperament they deserve." Reviewing for The Independent Review, a think tank associated with DiLorenzo, Richard M. Gamble called the book a "travesty of historical method and documentation". He said the book was plagued by a "labyrinth of [historical and grammatical] errors", and concluded that DiLorenzo has "earned the ... ridicule of his critics." In his review for the Claremont Institute, Ken Masugi writes that "DiLorenzo adopts as his own the fundamental mistake of leftist multi-culturalist historians: confusing the issue of race with the much more fundamental one, which was slavery." He noted that in Illinois "the anti-slavery forces actually joined with racists to keep their state free of slavery, and also free of blacks." Masugi called DiLorenzo's work "shabby" and stated that DiLorenzo's treatment of Lincoln was "feckless" and that the book is "truly awful". In 2002, DiLorenzo