America's political system isn't broken: it's working exactly as designed. But Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us--and how we are polarizing it--with disastrous results. In examining the structural and psychological forces behind America's descent into division and dysfunction, he shows that everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Now our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together--Adapted from jacket

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis. “A ripping read—well rendered, fast-paced and delivered with the same punch and assurance that she brings to a broadcast. . . . The parallels to the present day are strong, even startling.”— The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule. That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection. At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court. None of it went as planned. While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation. That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively. But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.” Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility. Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to “detransitioners”—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves. Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters. A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.

Winner of the 2009 Warwick Prize for Writing In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies. As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, "There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books."

At the end of WWII, the Soviet Union, to its surprise and delight, found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Central Europe. It set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system, Communism. Iron Curtain describes how the communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created, and what daily life was like once they were complete. Applebaum draws on newly opened European archives and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devestating detail millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief, rendered worthless their every qualification, and took everything away they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Block is a lost civilization, once whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality and strange aethestics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of this book.

Brainwashed is the explosive exposé of the leftist agenda at work in today's colleges, revealed by firebrand Ben Shapiro--syndicated columnist, podcaster, radio show host, and one of today's most exciting conservative voices--who's been on the front lines of the battle for America's young minds. This book proves once and for all that so-called higher education continues to sink lower and lower into the depths of liberal madness as close-minded professors turn their students into socialists, atheists, race-baiters, and sex-crazed narcissists. In this book, author Ben Shapiro asks three critical questions: Why are universities so biased? Why do students take their professors at face value? What can we do to stop it? In addition to outlining practical solutions as part of a multi-pronged strategy to deal with this problem, Brainwashed encourages students to consider the motives of their professors; pay attention to how professors use facts and editorialize during lectures; and ask questions, encourage debate, and think before buying into a professor's mindset. Praise for Brainwashed: "Ben Shapiro's writing is smart, informative, and incisive. He is wise beyond his years without losing the refreshing fearlessness of youth." Ann Coulter, bestselling author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors, Slander, and Treason "In Brainwashed, Shapiro tells the truth--that universities are forums of left-liberal indoctrination, where dissent is discouraged and penalized, with more restrictions on free speech rather any other part of American society. Parents who are paying for tuition might want to take note, and see what their hard-earned money is paying for." Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics "Welcome to P.C. 101. In this trenchant insider's expose, Ben Shapiro bears witness to the modern American campus freak show. You'll get up close and personal with the Marxist loons, moral relativists, multicultural zealots, and American-haters who are corrupting young minds. Brainwashed reveals the ignominious lows to which higher education has sunk. Get deprogrammed. Buy this book!" Michelle Malkin, nationally syndicated columnist and author of Invasion "Sharp thinking, tight writing, crazy-but-true stories: Ben Shapiro sees campus brainwashing and raises a national protest. This is a good book to give both freshmen who need warning and voters/alumni who need to take action." Dr. Marvin Olasky, University of Texas professor and editor-in-chief of World magazine "A worthy successor to God and Man at Yale and Harvard Hates America in exploring the belly of the academic beast." David Horowitz, founder of Students for Academic Freedom and author of Radical Son and Left Illusions "What Animal House did for the toga party, Brainwashed should do for American resistance to campus radicalism." Rusty Humphries, nationally syndicated radio talk show host

In Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law, Alan Dershowitz—#1 New York Times bestselling author and one of America’s most respected legal scholars—analyses the unremitting efforts by political opponents of Donald Trump to “get” him—to stop him from running in 2024—at any cost. Alan Dershowitz has been called “one of the most prominent and consistent defenders of civil liberties in America” by Politico and “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer and one of its most distinguished defenders of individual rights” by Newsweek . Get Trump makes clear that unconstitutional efforts to stop Trump from retaking the presidency challenge the very foundations of our liberty: due process, right to counsel, and free speech. Those who justify these dangerous departures from the rule of law argue that the threat posed by a second Trump presidency is “different” and “immediate,” while the departures from constitutional norms are longer term and more abstract. Dershowitz explains that defenders of Trump’s constitutional rights—even those like him who oppose Trump politically—are sought to be silenced; their free speech rights attacked, their integrity questioned, and their careers threatened. Much of the media substitutes advocacy against Trump for objective reporting, while many in academia petition and propagandize against rights they previously valued—all in the interest of getting Trump. The essence of justice is that it must be equally applicable to all, Dershowitz notes. No one is above the law but digging to find crimes in order to influence an election does not constitute the equal application of the law. In order to assure equal application in comparable situations, he proposes two criteria for indicting a likely candidate of the opposing party: the Richard Nixon standard and the Hillary Clinton standard—and most recently, the Joe Biden standard. Get Trump warns that regardless of whether this anti-democratic effort to stop Trump from running succeeds or fails, it is likely to create dangerous precedents that will lie around like loaded weapons ready to be deployed against other controversial candidates, officials, or citizens about whom it can be argued that the danger they pose “is different.”

"Public Opinion" is the fascinating study of the role of citizens in a democracy by Walter Lippmann, an American writer, reporter and political commentator. Lippmann's notable career spanned decades and produced some of the most important journalism in American history. He was the first to introduce the concept of the Cold War, received many awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, and wrote thousands of articles and columns, earning him the title of the "Great Elucidator". "Public Opinion" is Lippmann's assessment of a functional democratic government and the role that citizens play in the democracy. Lippmann examines the dilemmas presented in revolutionary periods of history and raises doubts on the ability of citizens to effectively govern themselves. He draws important attention to the media's role in shaping public perceptions and opinions and presciently warns against the power of propaganda. Lippmann's work exploring modern democracy, how it functions, and what situations most threaten its success have made "Public Opinion" a staple in the field of political science. Lippmann's work was far ahead of its time in understanding the dangers of propaganda and his conclusions remain relevant and thought-provoking nearly a century later.

From host of The Rubin Report , the most-watched talk show about free speech and big ideas on YouTube right now, a roadmap for free thinking in an increasingly censored world. The left is no longer liberal. Once on the side of free speech and tolerance, progressives now ban speakers from college campuses, "cancel" people who aren't up to date on the latest genders, and force religious people to violate their conscience. They have abandoned the battle of ideas and have begun fighting a battle of feelings. This uncomfortable truth has turned moderates and true liberals into the politically homeless class. Dave Rubin launched his political talk show The Rubin Report in 2015 as a meeting ground for free thinkers who realize that partisan politics is a dead end. He hosts people he both agrees and disagrees with--including those who have been dismissed, deplatformed, and despised--taking on the most controversial issues of our day. As a result, he's become a voice of reason in a time of madness. Now, Rubin gives you the tools you need to think for yourself in an age when tribal outrage is the only available alternative. Based on his own story as well as his experiences from the front lines of the free speech wars, this book will empower you to make up your own mind about what you believe on any issue and teach you the fine art of: Checking your facts, not your privilege , when it comes to today's most pervasive myths, from the wage gap and gun violence to climate change and hate crimes. Standing up to the mob against today's absurd PC culture, when differences of opinion can bring relationships, professional or personal, to a sudden end. Defending classically liberal principles such as individual rights and limited government, because freedom is impossible without them. The Progressive Woke Machine is waging war against the last free thinkers in the world. Don't Burn This Book is the definitive account of our current political upheaval and your guide to surviving it. Dave Rubin is the creator and host of The Rubin Report , the most-watched talk show about free speech and big ideas on YouTube. A former progressive turned classical liberal, he speaks to millions all over the world, including touring with Dr. Jordan Peterson, and performs stand-up comedy in cities around the United States.

Primetime Propaganda is the story of how television has been used over the past sixty years by Hollywood writers, producers, actors, and executives to promote their liberal ideals, to push the envelope on social and political issues, and to shape America in their own leftist image. In this thoroughly researched and detailed history of the television industry, the conservative columnist and bestselling author Ben Shapiro argues that left-leaning entertainment kingpins in Los Angeles and New York have leveraged—and continue to use—their positions and power to push liberal messages and to promote the Democratic Party while actively discriminating against their opponents on the right. According to Shapiro, television isn't just about entertainment—it's an attempt to convince Americans that the social, economic, and foreign policy shaped by leftism is morally righteous. But don't take his word for it. Shapiro interviewed more than one hundred of the industry's biggest players, including Larry Gelbart ( M*A*S*H ), Marta Kauffman ( Friends ), David Shore ( House ), and Mark Burnett ( Survivor ). Many of these insiders boast that not only is Hollywood biased against conservatives, but that many of the shows being broadcast have secret political messages. After reading this groundbreaking exposÉ, readers will never watch television the same way again.

Fox News host Mark Levin shows how those entrusted with news reporting today are destroying freedom of the press from within: "not government oppression or suppression," he writes, but self-censorship, group-think, bias by omission, and passing off opinion, propaganda, pseudo-events, and outright lies as news. Levin takes the reader on a journey through the early American patriot press, which proudly promoted the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, followed by the early decades of the Republic during which newspapers around the young country were open and transparent about their fierce allegiance to one political party or the other. It was only at the start of the Progressive Era and the twentieth century that the idea of "objectivity of the press" first surfaced, leaving us where we are today: with a partisan party-press overwhelmingly aligned with a political ideology but hypocritically engaged in a massive untruth as to its real nature

2015 Reprint of 1961 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In 1933 Meerloo began to study the methods by which systematic mental pressure brings people to abject submission, and by which totalitarians imprint their subjective "truth" on their victims' minds. In "The Rape of the Mind" he goes far beyond the direct military implications of mental torture to describing how our own culture unobtrusively shows symptoms of pressurizing people's minds. He presents a systematic analysis of the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and coercion, and shows how totalitarian strategy, with its use of mass psychology, leads to systematized "rape of the mind." He describes the new age of cold war with its mental terror, verbocracy, and semantic fog, the use of fear as a tool of mass submission and the problem of treason and loyalty, so loaded with dangerous confusion. The "Rape of the Mind" is written for the interested layman, not only for experts and scientists. Contents: Part One: The Techniques of Individual Submission. 1. You Too Would Confess. 2. Pavlov's Students as Circus Tamers. 3. Medication into Submission. 4. Why Do They Yield? The Psychodynamics of False Confession. Part Two: The Techniques of Mass Submission. 5. The Cold War against the Mind. 6. Totalitaria and its Dictatorship. 7. The Intrusion by Totalitarian Thinking. 8. Trial by Trial. 9. Fear as a Tool of Terror. Part Three: Unobtrusive Coercion. 10. The Child is Father to the Man. 11. Mental Contagion and Mass Delusion. 12. Technology Invades Our Minds. 13. Intrusion by the Administrative Mind. 14. The Turncoat in Each of Us. Part Four: In Search of Defenses. 15. Training Against Mental Torture. 16. Education for Discipline or Higher Morale. 17. From Old to New Courage. 18. Freedom -- Our Mental Backbone

“An indispensable and enduring field guide to the arguments the left makes—and the ones it tries to avoid.” — The Claremont Review of Books According to Jonah Goldberg, if the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves they’re not ideological. Today, “objective” journalists, academics, and “moderate” politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun apho­risms. Barack Obama casts himself as a disciple of reason: He’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and drama of the Right, solely concerned with “what works.” And today’s liberals follow his lead, spouting countless clichés such as: • One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter? • Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with King George III and ended slavery. • We need complete separation of church and state: In other words, all expressions of faith should be barred from politics . . . except when they support liberal programs. With humor and passion, Goldberg dismantles these and many other Trojan horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He shows that the Pro­gressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false flag of reasonableness is alive and well. And he reveals how this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER After a decade abroad, the National Book Award – and Pulitzer Prize – winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States—Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL—to illuminate the origins of America’s political fury. Evan Osnos moved to Washington, D.C., in 2013 after a decade away from the United States, first reporting from the Middle East before becoming the Beijing bureau chief at the Chicago Tribune and then the China correspondent for The New Yorker . While abroad, he often found himself making a case for his home country, urging the citizens of Egypt, Iraq, or China to trust that even though America had made grave mistakes throughout its history, it aspired to some foundational moral commitments: the rule of law, the power of truth, the right of equal opportunity for all. But when he returned to the United States, he found each of these principles under assault. In search of an explanation for the crisis that reached an unsettling crescendo in 2020—a year of pandemic, civil unrest, and political turmoil—he focused on three places he knew firsthand: Greenwich, Connecticut; Clarksburg, West Virginia; and Chicago, Illinois. Reported over the course of six years, Wildland follows ordinary individuals as they navigate the varied landscapes of twenty-first-century America. Through their powerful, often poignant stories, Osnos traces the sources of America’s political dissolution. He finds answers in the rightward shift of the financial elite in Greenwich, in the collapse of social infrastructure and possibility in Clarksburg, and in the compounded effects of segregation and violence in Chicago. The truth about the state of the nation may be found not in the slogans of political leaders but in the intricate details of individual lives, and in the hidden connections between them. As Wildland weaves in and out of these personal stories, events in Washington occasionally intrude, like flames licking up on the horizon. A dramatic, prescient examination of seismic changes in American politics and culture, Wildland is the story of a crucible, a period bounded by two shocks to America’s psyche, two assaults on the country’s sense of itself: the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Following the lives of everyday Americans in three cities and across two decades, Osnos illuminates the country in a startling light, revealing how we lost the moral confidence to see ourselves as larger than the sum of our parts.

David Mamet has been a controversial, defining force in nearly every creative endeavor-now he turns his attention to politics. In recent years, David Mamet realized that the so-called mainstream media outlets he relied on were irredeemably biased, peddling a hypocritical and deeply flawed worldview. In 2008 Mamet wrote a hugely controversial op-ed for the Village Voice , "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'", in which he methodically attacked liberal beliefs, eviscerating them as efficiently as he did Method acting in his bestselling book True and False . Now Mamet employs his trademark intellectual force and vigor to take on all the key political issues of our times, from religion to political correctness to global warming. The legendary playwright, author, director, and filmmaker pulls no punches in his art or in his politics. And as a former liberal who woke up, Mamet will win over an entirely new audience of others who have grown irate over America's current direction.

A driving force behind the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, Hoffman inspired a generation to challenge the status quo. "Steal This Book" captures Hoffman's message to all would-be revolutionaries: You don't have to take it anymore. Illustrations.

Like other great figures of 20th-century American politics, Lyndon Johnson defies easy understanding. An unrivaled master of vote swapping, back room deals, and election-day skulduggery, he was nevertheless an outspoken New Dealer with a genuine commitment to the poor and the underprivileged. And he was also a representative figure. Johnson's career speaks volumes about American politics, foreign policy, and business in the forty years after 1930. As Charles de Gaulle said when he came to JFK's funeral: Kennedy was America's mask, but this man Johnson is the country's real face.In Lone Star Rising, Robert Dallek, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his study of Franklin D. Roosevelt, turns to this fascinating "sinner and saint" to offer a brilliant, definitive portrait of a great American politician. Based on seven years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this first book in a two-volume biography follows Johnson's life from his childhood to his election as vice-president under Kennedy. We see Johnson, the twenty-three-year-old aide to a pampered millionaire Representative, become a de facto Congressman, and at age twenty-eight the country's best state director of the National Youth Administration. We see Johnson, the "human dynamo," first in the House and then in the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career.Dallek pays full due to Johnson's failings--his obsession with being top dog, his willingness to cut corners, and worse, to get there--but he also illuminates Johnson's sheer brilliance as a politician, the high regard in which key members of the New Deal, including FDR, held him, and his genuine concern for minorities and the downtrodden.No president in American history is currently less admired than Lyndon Johnson. Bitter memories of Vietnam have sent Johnson's reputation into free fall, and recent biographies have painted him as a scoundrel who did more harm than good. Lone Star Rising attempts to strike a balance. It does not neglect the tawdry side of Johnson's political career, including much that is revealed for the first time. But it also reminds us that Lyndon Johnson was a man of exceptional vision, who from early in his career worked to bring the South into the mainstream of American economic and political life, to give the disadvantaged a decent chance, and to end racial segregation for the well-being of the nation.

Acclaimed historian Rick Perlstein chronicles the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1960s. At the heart of the story is Barry Goldwater, the renegade Repulican from Arizona who loathed federal government, despised liberals and mocked peaceful coexistence with the USSR. Perlstein's narrative shines a light on a whole world of conservatives and their antagonists, including William F. Buckley, Nelson Rockefeller and Bill Moyers. Vividly written, Before the Storm is an essential book about the 1960s. When Before the Storm was originally published, it caused a critical outburst and went on to win the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History. Telling the tale of the Goldwater campaign and the rise of the conservative movement in the liberal 1060s, it was a tale that - until this book - had never been told. Before the Storm is smart and lively, and the description is delightfully thick, writes Louis Menand of the New Yorker. The point of Rick Perlstein's animated re-creation of the Goldwater campaign is that Barry Goldwater is as much a man of the 1960s as Abbie Hoffman or Malcolm X, and, what's more, his shadow looms a good deal larger than theirs.

An eye-opening introduction to the timelessly relevant ideas of Noam Chomsky, "arguably the most important intellectual alive" (The New York Times ), this book is a penetrating, illusion-shattering look at how things really work Offering something not found anywhere else, How the World Works is pure Chomsky, but tailored for those who are new to his work. The book is made up of meticulously edited speeches and interviews, and every dazzling idea and penetrating insight is kept intact and delivered in clear, accessible, reader-friendly prose. Originally published as a series of short works— What Uncle Sam Really Wants ; The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many ; Secrets, Lies and Democracy ; and The Common Good —these volumes together sold nearly 600,000 copies. Now collected into one comprehensive anthology, How the World Works reveals how Chomsky’s then-revolutionary ideas have only become more relevant as time has gone by. From the concept that extreme wealth and democracy cannot exist side-by-side; to how the assumptions of mainstream media purposefully limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion; to the decline of unions and workers’ rights thanks to corporations and their unconstrained quest for profit, Chomsky’s prescient theories of the future—not only the future of the United States, but of the world—make it very clear that our society is paying the price now for not heeding him then.