So, the Press of Mean, AKA Regnery, is filing for divorce from the New York Times.
Not that the New York Times is all broken up about it. Regnery peddles the almost-looniest ramblings of the Far Right. The NYT is hooked up with dozens of publishing houses, inasmuch as the Gray Lady heralds the best selling books in this holy land every week. Publishers became dewy-eyed at the prospect of landing a tome on one of the NYT‘s lists.
Regnery, a Washington-based outfit owned by Salem Media Group, specializes in specious wastes of ink and electrons spewed out by the likes of the following Squealers for the White Supremacist New World Empire:
- Pat Buchanan
- Mona Charen
- Whittaker Chambers
- Jerome Corsi
- Ann Coulter
- Dinesh D’Souza
- Deke DeLoach
- R. Lee Ermey
- Steve Forbes
- Mark Fuhrman
- Newt Gingrich
- Bernard Goldberg
- Dennis Hastert
- David Horowitz
- Laura Ingraham
- Wayne LaPierre
- G. Gordon Liddy
- David Limbaugh
- Chuck Norris
- Oliver North
- Ted Nugent
- Dennis Prager
- Rick Santorum
- Phyllis Schlafly
- Mark Skousen
- Donald J. Trump
- Geert Wilders
Go ahead, google any of these names. Odds are good you’ll find the description of a proud reprobate who’s broken any and all of his/her Christian commandments, fluffed for authoritarianism, pimped for the prosperity gospel, tingled for violence, tittered at others’ pain, shaded, fibbed and outright lied his or her way to a worldview, and otherwise called for a planet that’s nearly indistinguishable from that of 1984 or Brave New World. Their books range from The Real Custer, a sanitization of the racist, probably psychopathic general’s life, to The Murder Business, a racist cop’s fever dream that “the media” intentionally botches capital crime investigations for who-knows-what nefarious reasons.
Hmm, that’s two mentions of the word racist in one sentence. Don’t blame me for that literary gaffe; it’s Regnery.
Anyway, Regnery has announced it’s “cutting all ties with the New York Times— including the New York Times bestseller list.” The reason? “[W]e believe that the Times’ list does not represent national sales of conservative books as accurately as other widely-published bestseller lists.”
In other words, the NYT is giving short shrift to Regnery’s output, this despite the fact that the current NYT hardcover nonfiction bestseller list prominently features the latest scurrilous diatribe by Far Right darling Dinesh D’Souza — you guessed it, a Regnery author. BTW: D’Souza’s new book is entitled, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left. “The Democratic left has an ideology virtually identical with fascism and routinely borrows tactics of intimidation and political terror from the Nazi Brownshirts,” reads the author’s own hype.
If that’s a bestseller, we’re all fucked.
The truth is the New York Times indeed did tilt the scales away from a lot of Right-championed books beginning in the ‘Aughts. You may gasp, Golly gee, why?
Answer: the conservative publishing industry had learned how to game the list by buying in bulk, artificially goosing sales numbers. Right Wing organizations, PACs, oligarchs and plutocrats, and even authors themselves forked over big bucks to buy thousands of copies of titles at a crack, instantly and miraculously hoisting said titles onto the NYT bestseller list.
The NYT said, Uh uh, and began to place symbols next to bulk-bought titles on its list and, eventually, struck them from its list altogether unless they earned real and honest consumer sales figures.
So, okay, see ya later, Regnery. Don’t let the door hit you on your way out. And enjoy your books’ bestseller designations on WND and Alex Jones’ InfoWars.
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Sam’s Gig
It’s Big Talk Thursday. Tune in this afternoon at 5:00 for WFHB‘s Daily Local News. Big Talk usually airs around 5:14. My guest this week is author, historian, and archivist Sam Stephenson, the brains behind The Jazz Loft Project and penner of the new book, Gene Smith’s Sink.
Sam just moved to Bloomington in recent months. His wife scored a sweet research gig at Indiana University so the two moved from their erstwhile digs in North Carolina.
And thanks tons to Jeff Isaac for nagging me to have Sam on the show. Sam’s (and Smith’s) respective obsessions make for compelling conversation.
As always, I’ll post links to the feature as well as the original uncut interview here tomorrow.
Talk later, ‘kay?
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You are too indiscriminate in your denunciation. Steve Forbes and Mona Charen are decent, honorable conservatives and Whittaker Chambers was a genuine American hero. Chambers risked his reputation to go after highly placed friends who had betrayed their country to the Soviet Union, and his memoir, Witness, is one of the greatest memoirs in the American canon. You cannot understand the American Communist experience without reading this book, which has been corroborated by discoveries in the Soviet Communist Party archive after Gorbachev opened things up for a few years.
Regnery is a sad story. It started out as the principal outlet for the burgeoning conservative movement in the 1950s and 1960s. It published iconic books like Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and authors like Frank Meyer and Willmoore Kendall, and paperback reprints of political and philosophical classics. It was a great resource in my student activist days, and Henry Regnery had high standards. After his death, the firm passed on to his less fastidious son, who mismanaged it and sold out to a rather tawdry outfit specializing in turning out sensational swill by the likes of Ann Coulter and various alarmist nonsense designed to turn a fast buck. They are quite successful at it, but the imprint had a noble beginning that I would like to defend.
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You’re right, I did paint with too broad a brush stroke in that sense. And you’re right that Old Man Regnery did indeed strive to put out serious stuff like William F. Buckley’s first book — OTOH he did publish two books by Robert Welch (of subsequent John Birch Society fame). Nevertheless, the publisher’s current incarnation is a hate-spewing, empire-worshipping, melanin-fearing disinformation machine. I’d happily strike Forbes and Charen from the list (while still reserving the right to disdain their stances) if someone put a gun to my head.