Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind - Robert Draper

Category: Political
Language: English
Keywords: #MAGA 2020 Election 2024 Election Cycle 6 January American Democracy Anti-vaxx Conspiracism Conspiracy Theories Delusional Thinking Delusions Democracy Disinformation Donald Trump Fake News False Beliefs False Information Gop Government Insurrection Lauren Boebert Madison Cawthorn Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Gaetz Media Studies Paul Gosar Politics Politics & Government Politics & Social Sciences Republican Party Sociology US Congress US politics Washington

Written by Robert Draper
Read by Paul Boehmer
Format: MP3
Unabridged

One of The Washington Post’s 10 Best Books of 2022

“Vital and indispensable… Fighting falsehood is all that matters if democracy is to survive, and Draper comes with the fiercest weapon yet: truth.”
— The Washington Post

“Engrossing.”
— Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

“Draper provides pungent new anecdotes about and original analysis of the most outrageous actors [in the Trump era].”
— The Guardian

The disturbing eyewitness account of how a new breed of Republicans—led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn—far from moving on from Trump, have taken the politics of hysteria to even greater extremes and brought American democracy to the edge

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was a terrible day for American democracy, but many people dared to hope that at least it would break the fever that had overcome the Republican Party and banish Trump’s relentless lies about the stealing of the 2020 election.

That is not what happened. Instead, ‘the big steal’ has become dogma among an ever-higher percentage of American Republicans. What happened to the Republican Party, and America, during the Trump presidency is a story we more or less think we know. What has happened to the party since, it turns out, is even more disquieting. That is the story Robert Draper tells in Weapons of Mass Delusion.

Through his extraordinarily intrepid cross-country reporting, Draper chronicles the road from January 6 to the 2022 midterms among the Republican base and in the U.S. Congress, rendering unforgettable portraits of how Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ilk came to shape their party’s terms of engagement to an extent that would have been unimaginable even five years ago.

He also brings to life the efforts of a dwindling group of Republicans who are willing to push back against the falsehoods, in the face of a group of ascendent demagogues who are merrily weaponizing them.

With a base whipped up into a perpetual frenzy of outrage by conspiracy theories—not just about the big steal but about COVID and vaccines, pedophilia and Antifa and Black Lives Matter and George Soros and President Obama, and on and on and on—the forces of reason within the GOP are on the defensive, to put it mildly.

The book also benefits greatly from reporting conducted in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and other bellwether states in the country of the mind one might call a fever of undending conspiracies.

Robert Draper has been a wise, fearless, and fair-minded chronicler of the American political scene for over twenty-five years. He has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. He has never seen it this ugly. Ultimately, this book tells the story of a fearful test of our ability, as a country, to hold together a system of government grounded in truth and the rule of law.

Written on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, Draper’s account of a party teetering on the precipice of madness reveals how the GOP fringe became its center of gravity.