In this controversial National Bestseller, the former CEO of NPR sets out for conservative America wondering why these people are so wrong about everything. It turns out, they aren’t. Ken Stern watched the increasing polarization of our country with growing concern. As a longtime partisan Democrat himself, he felt forced to acknowledge that his own views were too parochial, too absent of any exposure to the “other side.” In fact, his urban neighborhood is so liberal, he couldn’t find a single Republican--even by asking around. So for one year, he crossed the aisle to spend time listening, talking, and praying with Republicans of all stripes. With his mind open and his dial tuned to the right, he went to evangelical churches, shot a hog in Texas, stood in pit row at a NASCAR race, hung out at Tea Party meetings and sat in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. He also read up on conservative wonkery and consulted with the smartest people the right has to offer. What happens when a liberal sets out to look at issues from a conservative perspective? Some of his dearly cherished assumptions about the right slipped away. Republican Like Me reveals what lead him to change his mind, and his view of an increasingly polarized America.
Whether running through a mock jungle firing an Uzi in Kentucky or enjoying a reasonably priced meal at Applebee's with white supremacists, author, agitator, flaming liberal and first-class playa-hater Harmon Leon is willing to go to great lengths to understand the psyche of right-wing conservatives. In his new book, Republican Like Me, Leon goes undercover as a conservative...The result is one of the funniest and most insightful books ever written, worming into the belly of the Bible-thumping beast and beating the enemy on its own turf. Republican Like Me raises the bar for political humor, turning journalism into a contact sport. There are no pundits or rhetoric-spewing talking heads-just Leon vs. the bad guys in no-holds-barred death match at the juncture of political activism and absurdist theater.- Boulder WeeklyFunny as hell.- Howard SternHarmon Leon is a free radical, a random element that infiltrates a situation to introduce chaos, mayhem and hilarity ... Republican like Me turns the tables on red state rednecks who paint lefties as exotic and un-American. With each incursion into such conservative bastions as the Republican Party and racist hate groups, brazen liberal Leon exposes the right for the weirdos they are. And he still has time left over to make fun of Democrats! A tour-de-force of political satire.- Ted Rall, editorial cartoonist for Universal Press SyndicateWhen the red states trumped the blue states in the 2004 presidential election, many Democrats were left wondering just what makes the conservative mindset tick. Wonder no more. Join self-described infiltration journalist Harmon Leon as he goes undercover to explore what being conservative really means.A flaming liberal in real life, Leon has been called a cross between Michael Moore and South Park. He shares with readers his hilarious misadventures as he dons the persona of a pissed-off convenience store clerk at the Knob Creek Biannual Machine Gun Shoot in Bullit County, Kentucky. Next, he's working security in southern California at an Arnold for Governor rally, where he has several memorable encounters with the Terminator himself - and finds himself constantly promoted!But this is only the beginning. Leon reports on his zany experience at a Christian wrestling extravaganza, where the scantily clad wrestlers toss opponents into the stands in the name of Jesus. Taking a different tack, he paints on temporary tattoos, wears a black T-shirt reading Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out! and then entertainingly describes the reactions he gets when he tries to purchase a condominium in an exclusive gated community.Uncertain about whether his inspiration is Jane Goodall or journalist John Howard Griffin, author of the 1950s' classic Black Like Me, Leon nonetheless perseveres from one adventure to the next, hoping not to be found out and get his head broken. Leon's daring anthropological romps into finding out how the other half lives are by turns outrageous, disturbing, and hilarious, yet always illuminating. Don't be surprised to find yourself laughing out loud as you turn each page!Harmon Leon (San Francisco, CA) is an award-winning journalist who has appeared on The Howard Stern Show, Penn and Teller: Bullshit!, and The Jamie Kennedy Experiment, and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, Details, E!, NPR's This American Life, Spin, Wired, The Guardian, and more. His first book, The Harmon Chronicles, won a 2003 Independent Publishers Award for humor. Leon is also a stand-up comedian.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Democracy Awakening, “the most comprehensive account of the GOP and its competing impulses” (Los Angeles Times) When Abraham Lincoln helped create the Republican Party on the eve of the Civil War, his goal was to promote economic opportunity for all Americans, not just the slaveholding Southern planters who steered national politics. Yet, despite the egalitarian dream at the heart of its founding, the Republican Party quickly became mired in a fundamental identity crisis. Would it be the party of democratic ideals? Or would it be the party of moneyed interests? In the century and a half since, Republicans have vacillated between these two poles, with dire economic, political, and moral repercussions for the entire nation. In To Make Men Free, celebrated historian Heather Cox Richardson traces the shifting ideology of the Grand Old Party from the antebellum era to the Great Recession, revealing the insidious cycle of boom and bust that has characterized the Party since its inception. While in office, progressive Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower revived Lincoln's vision of economic freedom and expanded the government, attacking the concentration of wealth and nurturing upward mobility. But they and others like them have been continually thwarted by powerful business interests in the Party. Their opponents appealed to Americans' latent racism and xenophobia to regain political power, linking taxation and regulation to redistribution and socialism. The results of the Party's wholesale embrace of big business are all too familiar: financial collapses like the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression in 1929, and the Great Recession in 2008. With each passing decade, with each missed opportunity and political misstep, the schism within the Republican Party has grown wider, pulling the GOP ever further from its founding principles. Expansive and authoritative, To Make Men Free is a sweeping history of the Party that was once America's greatest political hope -- and, time and time again, has proved its greatest disappointment.
In this fascinating firsthand account, Sheila Kennedy, head of the Indiana CLU, explains her amazement at stalwart conservatives who seem to think that being a Republican is utterly incompatible with a firm devotion to civil liberties. In perceptive anecdotes, Kennedy skewers the rampant misrepresentations about civil liberties, the ACLU, and those who have abandoned the libertarian heart of the GOP.
This is part cookbook, part how-to for non-Republicans, part payback (“Thanks, Mom, for all the swell tricks with Lipton Onion Soup Mix”), and part sheer revenge, as in for one horrifying night when the author was invited to dinner by a coven of Democrats under the pretext of eating a decent whole roasted prime tenderloin and was cruelly served a whole roasted baby tuna. Her date, a Republican fish-hater (a Republican redundancy, by the way, see Chapter 3, Fish), memorably reacted by getting dead drunk and passing out at the table with his face in the tuna. This capriciously organized collection of the kinds of homey recipes Republicans grow up on pays little regard to attribution, since, in the words of the author, “Nobody ever remembers where the recipe originally came from anyway.”
You have NEVER seen Coulter like this before! Coulter is uncensored, unapologetic, and unflinching in her ruthless mockery of liberals, sissies, morons, hypocrites, and all other species of politician. Coulter doesn’t stop at the politicians, though. Watch her skewer pundits, salesmen, celebrities, and bureaucrats with ruthlessness and hilarity. No topic is safe! This is Coulter at her most incisive, funny, and brilliant, featuring irreverent and hilarious material her syndicators were too afraid to print!
Over the last year, award-winning journalist and videographer Max Blumenthal has been behind some of the most sensational (and funniest) exposes of Republican machinations. Whether it was his revelation that Sarah Palin was "anointed" by a Kenyan priest famous for casting out witches, or his confronting Republican congressional leaders and John McCain's family at the GOP convention about the party's opposition to sex education (and hence, the rise in teen pregnancies like that of Palin's daughter), or his expose of the eccentric multimillionaire theocrat behind California's Prop 8 anti- gay marriage initiative, Blumenthal has become one of the most important and most constantly cited journalists on how fringe movements are becoming the Republican Party mainstream. Republican Gomorrah is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidness from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party. It shows how those forces are the ones that establishment Republicans-like John McCain-have to bow to if they have any hope of running for President. It shows that Sarah Palin was the logical choice of a party in the control of theocrats. But more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement's leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.
YOU DON'T KNOW ME unearths the scandals that don't quite align with the Republican Party's so-called "family values." From Gingrich's serial affairs, to O'Reilly's lewd telephone conversations, to Horsley's barnyard liaisons, this compendium will shock readers and enlighten voters as to what happens behind the closed doors of the right. YOU DON’T KNOW ME: A CITIZEN'S GUIDE TO REPUBLICAN FAMILY VALUES outlines the hypocrisy behind some key G.O.P. platforms. In an easy to use A-Z format, Win McCormack demonstrates right-wing depravity from adultery to zoophilia. With a mix of high-profile offenders—such as Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Bill O'Reilly, and Larry Craig—and under-the-radar scandals, You Don't Know Me makes a strong case that Republican finger pointing is no more than another instance of the pot calling the kettle black.
Now updated to include Trump's election and the rise of global populism, Corey Robin's 'The Reactionary Mind' traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution.
“An urgent and engaging look at how American politics have become the founding fathers’ worst nightmare” (The Daily Beast). America’s political system is dysfunctional. We know it, yet the problem seems intractable—after every election, voters discover yet again that political “leaders” are simply quarreling in a never-ending battle between the two warring tribes. As a former congressman, Mickey Edwards witnessed firsthand how important legislative battles can devolve into struggles not over principle but over party advantage. He offers graphic examples of how this problem has intensified and reveals how political battles have become nothing more than conflicts between party machines. In this critically important book, he identifies exactly how our political and governing systems reward intransigence, discourage compromise, and undermine our democracy—and describes exactly what must be done to banish the negative effects of partisan warfare from our political system and renew American democracy. “Overcoming tribalism and knee-jerk partisanship is the central challenge of our time. Mickey Edwards shows why and how in this fascinating book filled with sensible suggestions.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times–bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci “Many Americans, whether Democrats, Republicans, independent or otherwise, would welcome a few more like [Edwards] in office.” —The Boston Globe
