Your Last Chance (Really!) for the American Psychosis Special Deal

By David Corn  September 1, 2022

You know those annoying emails that clutter your in-box proclaiming that you have UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT to make a contribution to this or that politician? I seem to get several a day, sometime a dozen or two. (Donald Trump just won’t leave me alone!) And it’s usually a lie—in that there’s not truly special about this midnight deadline. Well…now it’s my turn. In a way.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been the desperate author promoting my forthcoming book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, which will be published on September 13. To encourage pre-orders—which these days are vital for the successful launch of a book—I arranged a special deal for Our Land subscribers who purchase the book before its release: 35 percent off for a signed copy. Click HERE to take advantage of this offer. And if you’re going to click, click soon. Because, yes, the offer expires at midnight…tomorrow night. A direct-mail consultant would tell me that I should say “tonight” to create a sense of urgency that would no doubt compel you to immediately hit that link and buy the book. But that would be untrue, and as a journalist who often pokes at grifty pols for their ridiculous and hyperbolic fundraising lies (YOUR DONATION WILL BE MATCHED 15X!!!), I have no choice but to stick to the facts: you have ONLY 38 HOURS LEFT (depending on when you open this email) to avail yourself of this special order.

I would appreciate if you ORDER NOW…or at least consider doing so. American Psychosis chronicles the GOP’s seven-decade-long relationship with far-right fanaticism and recounts how the Republican Party has repeatedly encouraged and exploited extremism, paranoia, tribalism, and bigotry. It didn’t start with Trump. This is a rollicking history of the ugly side of the GOP that the party has long refused to acknowledge and that the media has often ignored or poorly covered. Below are items about the book and sneak peeks that appeared in recent issues of Our Land­—in case you missed them or have only recently subscribed. I hope they prompt you to CLICK HERE before MIDNIGHT (that is, midnight tomorrow night). Heartfelt thanks to the many of you who have pre-ordered. I’m grateful for your help and hope this book allows you and others to better understand how we reached the political crisis the nation now faces. (I also hope this blatant act of promotion doesn’t put anyone off. A regular issue of Our Land should hit your in-box tomorrow.)

Announcing My New Book…and Asking for Your Help (July 19, 2022 issue)

Over the past year, I have read through hundreds of books, scoured many more newspaper and magazine articles, and reviewed government records, campaign memos, and personal correspondence in assorted archives across the country to investigate how the Republican Party went bonkers. This has led to a book appropriately titled American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. It chronicles the 70-year relationship between the GOP and far-right fanaticism and recounts the party’s long-running effort to exploit and encourage extremism, bigotry, paranoia, and tribalism. The book examines and explains the party’s critical partnerships with extremists—from McCarthyism to the Birchers to the Southern strategy to the New Right to the religious right to Palinism (as in Sarah Palin) to the Tea Party to Donald Trump. It didn’t start with Trump. His alliance with kooks, racists, conspiracists, and other extremists is not an aberration; for decades the Party of Lincoln has relied on, egged on, and embraced the forces of hate, conspiracism, and racial bias to win elections. Republicans and many others do not acknowledge this shameful and ugly history. As far as I can tell, no other book connects these dots and tells this story of the GOP’s dark side.

Here’s what Jane Mayer, the New Yorker correspondent and author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, said after reading the book:

David Corn's American Psychosis is essential reading for anyone hoping to restore political sanity in America. It argues convincingly that the toxic brew of bigotry, conspiracy theories, and lies that define Trumpism started long before Trump. Corn chronicles the Republican Party's decades-long slide into the gutter and weaves this investigative history into a compelling narrative that is equal parts horrifying and entertaining. Corn has managed to make brilliant sense of American senselessness.

Thanks, Jane….

I’m sure you’ve seen authors pleading for people to preorder their book before its release date. Writing a book will turn even the most self-effacing progressive into a capitalist mad-dog salesperson. After devoting a year, or many years, to the project, you desperately want all that hard work to have meaning. As in people buying and reading it. Some authors refer to books as their children. That’s a bit of a stretch. But a book is an extension and a reflection of its author. To write a book is to put yourself in a position to be judged—by readers, reviewers, and the market. We authors crave approval, thus the desire to race down a crowded street, grab strangers by the arm, and beg them to buy your book. Or something like that.

These days, because of the increasing importance of preorders, that impulse kicks in before the book is released. Booksellers (and their algorithms) use these preorders to determine how they will handle individual books. Will they order large numbers from a publisher and display big stacks of the book in the front of a store or heavily promote it on its website? Or will they request a small number of books and toss them on a shelf far from the gaze of browsing customers? Online retailers—ok, Amazon—can show you the book when you’re shopping for something else, or leave it up to you to search for it. All of this makes a great difference in sales. The more books any one of these places order, the more it is committed to championing the book.

That’s why publishers, and authors, obsess over preorders. It’s all about creating velocity for a book. That also means that early buyers have more clout. Because preorders usually are a small percentage of a book’s total sales, preorder purchasers have more influence and the potential to help launch a book into success. You literally can be a trendsetter.

My editor at Twelve (an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, which is part of Hachette Book Group) explained a few other benefits of preorders. A reader will receive the book lickety-split, often on the publication date. And Twelve will provide early buyers sneak peeks at content and “other giveaways.” (Details to come.) An early purchaser will help determine how a book is perceived, particularly a book with political content, which in turn can impact the overall political culture since media commentators and pundits often look to book sales as a political indicator. If conservative books dominate the bestsellers’ list—right now I see several Fox-related authors on the list—that is taken as a sign of right-wing energy and enthusiasm. The success of books that challenge the right can help shape the larger political cultural battle—and be a blow for truth and freedom.

All this explanation is a prelude for me asking you to consider preordering American Psychosis. To make it easier, I’ve arranged with Twelve to offer Our Land readers a special deal via Porchlight Books. If you preorder now—click HERE—you can get a signed copy of American Psychosis for 35 percent off.

One reason that I enjoyed writing American Psychosis—reviewing American history (going back even to the Salem witch trials) and exploring the saga of the GOP and the role of paranoia, conspiracy theories, hatred, and extremism in politics since the birth of the republic—was that I learned a lot. I never knew that the Ku Klux Klan was a key participant in the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1924. Nor did I realize that the fellow who gave Pat Robertson the idea to create the Christian Coalition was an antisemitic political defender of a white supremacist. Regular readers of this newsletter and my pieces in Mother Jones can see how all this research has informed my coverage of the current political mess that has been caused by Republicans and the forces of extremism.

I wrote American Psychosis so that I could better understand the current crisis and what brought us here. The past few years have sharply illuminated the worst elements within the Republican Party. And this moment offers the opportunity to show that what’s been occurring in the Trump era is not a fundamental shift for the GOP. Trump was the first president to summon white supremacists, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, and other far-right fanatics to form a mob that attacked the US Capitol. But he was continuing his party’s tradition of cynically and crassly exploiting extremism to win political power. He didn’t invent this tactic. He just made it more obvious.

Now is the time to fully expose this core component of the Republican Party. With a stronger grasp of the past, we will have an improved shot at addressing the profound challenges the nation faces.

Tease No. 1 (July 23, 2022 issue)

The book tells the story of the dark side of the modern GOP—a history that the party and most of the media have long ignored or downplayed. Did you know that when Dwight David Eisenhower was running for president in 1952 as a moderate Republican, he wanted to attack Red-bating Sen. Joe McCarthy, whom he believed was a lying scoundrel and fearmonger? But top Republican Party officials told Ike that McCarthy’s wild and false claims of widespread commie infiltration throughout the US government were helping the GOP at the polls and that assailing McCarthyism would hurt Eisenhower’s chances to win the White House. Eisenhower caved and allowed McCarthy to define his party and dominate the nation’s political discourse. American Psychosis details that story and many others chronicling the long stretch of Republican exploitation of the worst elements of American life.

Tease No. 2 (July 29, 2022 issue)

William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review and the intellectual guru of the modern right, is often credited with bouncing the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement in the 1960s. The Birchers were a kooky band of paranoid conspiracy theorists led by a former candy manufacturer who believed Dwight Eisenhower was a commie agent. They also believed secret Reds had infiltrated every nook and cranny of US society, including the PTA. Buckley has been hailed as a responsible leader of the right for excommunicating these nutballs from respectable conservatism, yet it’s not as straightforward as that. Plotting with Sen. Barry Goldwater, the right wing’s hero, ahead of the Arizona senator’s 1964 presidential run, Buckley at first did not move to throw the Birchers to the curb. Even though the group was under fire, he tried to give them cover and keep these fanatics within the right so they could help Goldwater’s campaign. (Sound familiar?) Only later did Buckley decry the group. You can read the full details of this episode in American Psychosis.

Tease No. 3 (August 5, 2022 issue)

In 1960, when Richard Nixon was running for president, many prominent Republicans were pushing for him to alter the party’s strategy regarding Black voters. As the Party of Lincoln, the GOP had been the choice for many Black voters. But Sen. Barry Goldwater and others believed that the South, long a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, could be won over by appealing to racist voters with a message of states’ rights and limited government. Such themes would play well with Southern voters opposed to federal efforts to advance the rights of Black people. In essence, these Republicans proposed dumping the Black voters of the North for white voters in the South who opposed anti-segregation measures. Nixon said no and stuck to the party’s traditional position of appealing to Black voters. And he lost narrowly to John Kennedy, who, with Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson as his running-mate, won most of the South.

That was then. When Nixon sought the presidency again eight years later, he flipped his position. He made a deal with Sen. Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina segregationist, to appoint conservative judges who would not support far-reaching civil rights action. In return, Thurmond made sure the Southern Republican bosses stuck with Nixon, rather than support rising star Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. And Nixon developed what would become known as the Southern strategy of allying himself with the South’s racists to win Dixie’s votes. During the GOP convention that year, he told a top aide to promise Thurmond and other racist Southerners that Nixon would “lay off pro-Negro crap.” American Psychosis details how the calculating Nixon got into bed with white supremacists and exploited racism to nab the GOP nomination and the presidency.

Tease No. 4 (August 19, 2022 issue)

Ronald Reagan remains the patron saint of conservative Republicans. He’s hailed by right-wingers as a strong, principled defender of American values. Less known is that he supported the most despicable of far-right extremists. Having won the presidency in 1980 with the assistance of the religious right, most notably the Moral Majority that had recently been created by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and leaders of the New Right, Reagan owed these hate-fueled fundamentalists a huge debt. Falwell had risen to political power by excoriating gay people as an existential threat to America. Gay persons, he said, would “kill you as quick as look at you.” And when Reagan was elected, he took credit—justifiably, given that pollster Lou Harris calculated that “Reagan would have lost the election by one percentage point without the help of the Moral Majority.”

Shortly after Reagan assumed office, several Moral Majority officials declared their desire to kill homosexuals. Greg J. Dixon, a Baptist minister and national secretary of Falwell’s outfit, said that according to “God’s Word,” gay people could be executed. A top Moral Majority official in California stated that homosexuality was a sin that warranted capital punishment. The Reverend Bob Billings, a co-founder of the Moral Majority who was awarded with a job in the Reagan administration, proclaimed at a meeting of the group that he wished he and his fellow gay-bashers could “get in our cars and run them down” when people marched in gay rights parades. Despite all this hate, the Reagan White House repeatedly praised the Moral Majority. In one “Dear Jerry” note, Reagan stated, “By furthering the spiritual strength of the American people, your movement helps fulfill the promise of this great land.” Instead, Falwell’s movement was encouraging animosity and violence.

Reagan enabled far-right hatred. Not only with the Moral Majority. His White House courted and supported Nazi collaborators—actual antisemites and fascists who had worked with Hitler’s forces during World War II and who afterward fashioned themselves fierce anticommunist crusaders. I know. This sounds almost unbelievable. But it happened, and American Psychosis has the receipts.

Tease No. 5 (August 26, 2022 issue)

Would you support someone who claimed you were literally part of a Satanic plot to destroy the world? The GOP has done that. In early 1990, Pat Robertson, a nutty but wealthy televangelist who had unsuccessfully run for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, formed the Christian Coalition, and the outfit fast became a political powerhouse, fielding and backing far-right and socially conservative candidates across the land. The GOP quickly embraced the organization, with top Republicans, including presidential wannabes, flocking to its annual convention. The first of these shindigs, held in November 1991, drew Vice President Dan Quayle, Sen. Jesse Helms, and several House Republicans. At this confab, Robertson shared his bizarre and conspiratorial world view, claiming the “academic elites, the money elites, and the government elites” were trying to “destroy” American society and impose a one-world government—and they were in league with Lucifer to do so.

Weeks earlier, Robertson had published a book asserting that this evil, anti-Christian, Satanic plot was being aided and abetted by none other than President George H.W. Bush. This book, titled The New World Order, was a pile of paranoia that compiled the various conspiracy theories of the ages and claimed secret societies, occultists, communists, and elites had for centuries conspired to lock the world into a godless, collectivist dictatorship. The Federal Reserve, the J.P. Morgan bank, the Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations, Henry Kissinger, the Trilateral Commission—they were all in on it. So, too, were “European bankers” and the Rothschild family (long a target of the antisemitic conspiracy theories Robertson echoed). Bush, Robertson revealed, had “unwittingly” carried out “the mission” and mouthed “the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his follows.”

That is, George Bush was a Satanic dupe. With this book, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies and became a bestseller, Robertson transmitted classic antisemitic garbage and the slop of conspiracism. The Wall Street Journal called the work a “compendium of the lunatic fringe’s greatest hits.” Yet the GOP welcomed Robertson into its tent, validating this loon. A year later, Bush attended the second annual conference of Robertson’s Christian Coalition and lauded Robertson for “all the work you’re doing to restore the spiritual foundation of this nation.” He then attended a private reception with major contributors to the coalition in the rose garden of Robertson’s estate. Black swans swam in a pond, as Bush warmly greeted members of the televangelist’s inner circle. Presumably, Bush’s alliance with Satan was not mentioned. American Psychosis has all the details on how Bush and the GOP forged a partnership with this crazy, antisemitic, conspiratorial extremist—while claiming to seek a kinder, gentler nation.

So What Should You Do Now?

If you’ve reached this point, you’re probably interested in the GOP’s long-running and dangerous dance with extremists. I know of no other book that tells this story in full. So please think about pre-ordering a discounted signed copy of American Psychosis…by midnight tomorrow night. Operators are standing by. Okay, not really. But an easy-to-use website page is. Many thanks.