Max Blumenthal, writer for The Nation and The New York Times, and senior writer for The Daily Beast, is out making the promotional rounds for his provocatively-titled bestseller, Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party.

In it, Blumenthal hacks through what The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg calls the “dank forests of American Christianism.”  Yesterday, he sat down with—and withstood—Joe Scarborough (see above), who grills Blumenthal on everything from birthers to death panels.

Blumenthal was also a recent guest of Terry Gross.  You can listen to the interview here.  In it, Blumenthal calls out such lesser known, behind-the-curtain players as the late RJ Rushdoony and his “financial angel” Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., who, after emerging, “saved,” from a mental institution, declared, “my goal is the total integration of biblical law into everyday lives.”

Beyond his work as a writer, though, Blumenthal’s produced a number of videos—including the “banned from YouTube” vid, Feel The Hate.  You can watch that here, but you should also check out In The Land Of Queen Esther (below), where Blumenthal explores the possible Sarah Palin connection to the biblically-inspired Queen, and how Alaska’s crown-like shape might betray its ultimate purpose: serving as an end-of-days, post-rapture refuge for everyone in the lower 48.

 
Bonus: Max Blumethal’s Gun Show Nation!

The Nation excerpts Max Blumenthal’s new book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. (Blumenthal is the journalist that uncovered the video of Sarah Palin being anointed by Kenyan “witch hunters.”)

The jacket copy makes it sound like a pure winner. Might have to order this one:

Republican Gomorrah is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidmess from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party. It shows how those forces are the ones that establishment Republicans-like John McCain-have to bow to if they have any hope of running for President. It shows that Sarah Palin was the logical choice of a party in the control of theocrats. But more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement’s leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.

The Nation’s excerpt focuses on the damage done to developing minds by batshit insane Republican home-school programs, focusing on school shooter (and Crowley/OTO enthusiast) Matthew Murray.

A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity”...

Murray lurched to the polar opposite edge of his parents’ fanatical faith, replacing their Bible as his inspiration with the writings of Aleister Crowley, a flamboyant, self-proclaimed Satanist. The fin de si?ɬ