Afternoon Open Thread

David Neiwert is the author of The Eliminationists — How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, a book I’m currently reading. If you’ve followed any of Neiwert’s work at Orcinus or at Crooks and Liars, you know that his longtime project is reporting on the fringe right and increasingly he has been reporting on how the ideas and speech of these fringe groups gets mainstreamed. It is maddening reading — less for the persistently hateful content of this speech, or even for the unthinking acceptance of this kind of talk from so-called Christians and family-values purveyors, but for the real complicity of not just the media, but the entire political class in normalizing this clueless stuff.

I’ll probably have more to say about this book when I’m done with it, but in the meantime, here is video of Neiwert talking about his book on a recent radio program. This is about 30 mins long, but definitely worth the time.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etoyumdyRS4[/youtube]

And you — what are you reading and thinking about this afternoon?