William Regnery II is DEAD!

Fuck all these dudes.

Break out the party hats, the millionaire who funded so much evil and misinformation in the world has kicked the bucket, finally.

William H. Regnery II, a racist, reclusive multimillionaire who used his inherited fortune to finance vile white supremacist groups in the hopes of one day forming an American whites-only ethnostate, died earlier this month, his family and associates confirmed. He was 80 years old.

Regnery, whose family amassed riches from its right-wing publishing empire, died on July 2 in Florida after a “long battle with cancer,” his cousin Alfred, the former head of Regnery Publishing, confirmed to HuffPost.

I wouldn’t normally say this about a cancer victim, but jesus, I hope he suffered. He’s the lunatic with a fortune and a printing press who has been bankrolling creationists and fascists for decades. He gets a lengthy obit in the NY Times, the SPLC does a better job. This is the man who founded the National Policy Institute, if you like your Nazis with an innocuous title, and the Occidental Quarterly, if you want your racist pseudoscience dressed up as a pretend science journal.

I’d like to dream that the poison he injected into the nation will rot with his corpse, but I suspect there will be a new snake slithering into his place and his money.

Who you gonna call when you’ve got a racist book to publish? REGNERY!

Oh yes, Josh Hawley lost his big book deal when he advocated insurrection, but he didn’t have to worry — there’s a publishing house that’s always ready to endorse the very worst in American politics. Now it’s going to be published by Regnery.

If I may quote myself…

Regnery Publishing has been on my radar for a long, long time. They’re the go-to publishing house for far-right-wing cranks everywhere: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, every angry loon who mainlines AM talk radio, or babbles on AM talk radio, can turn to Regnery to take the fevered hash festering in their brains and turn it into ink on paper. I’ve been tracking their poison for so long because another collection of kooks using their services are the creationists. The Discovery Institute loves them some Regnery. Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design was published with them, as was Icons of Evolution. If you want to lie about science, history, or politics, Regnery will publish it.

The Regnery family seems to have been born of spawning slime monsters, but even they couldn’t deal with William H. Regnery II, who was squeezed out of control years ago. He has since been using his undeserved wealth to support all kinds of terrible projects.

By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States. He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

Who was supporting the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer? William H. Regnery II, via the National Policy Institute, which he founded. It seems to have been his hobby, creating racist organization and funneling money into it.

…Regnery founded a nonprofit dedicated to providing “a cultural home for our children’s children,” as he wrote in a founder’s statement. It was called the Charles Martel Society, commemorating an 8th-century Frankish king who turned back an Arab invasion—and thus, in the view of white supremacists, saved European civilization almost before it began. Regnery packed the society’s board with men who shared his racial concerns. They included the late Sam Francis, a former Washington Times columnist who suggested that white people could solve racial problems by “imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites.”

The Martel Society still exists, and even has its own magazine, The Occidental Quarterly, an excellent source for online racism. It’s edited by Kevin MacDonald, a prominent “race realist”, and also a vocal evolutionary psychologist (how surprising).

The whole dang family is rotten to the core.

The Regnery family’s political story starts with his grandfather and namesake, William H. Regnery, a Chicago textile magnate. He was a New Deal Democrat, but in 1940 he helped found the right-wing America First Committee, which sought to stop the United States from going to war against Nazi Germany. The committee, which attracted Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, disbanded when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

The America First name, meanwhile, has experienced a renaissance as one of Trump’s leading mottos for his presidency.

White couples weren’t having enough babies, Regnery declared, and the government was allowing in hordes of nonwhite immigrants “as if to hasten our demise.”
After World War II, Regnery’s uncle, Henry Regnery, made the family a power in GOP politics through his publishing house, which was subsidized by inherited wealth. He printed the works of writers whom he called “giants of American conservatism:” William F. Buckley Jr. (“God and Man at Yale”), Russell Kirk (“The Conservative Mind”), and Robert Welch, co-founder of the John Birch Society. Regnery books—anti-communist, anti-big-government and pro-business—helped define what it meant to be a Republican in postwar America. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized as “the godfather of modern conservatism.”

William Regnery II’s cousin, Alfred Regnery, was an official in the Reagan administration’s Justice Department and then became president of Regnery Publishing. The imprint still exists, under new ownership: Among its recent best-selling authors are Ann Coulter (Adios, America!) and Trump (Time to Get Tough). Regnery himself plunged into conservative politics at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1960s. As he wrote in his 2015 memoir, Left Behind, he joined the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit set up to recruit Republican activists on college campuses. His family helped endow the institute, and Regnery remained involved for more than 40 years. On the institute’s board, he associated with GOP stalwarts, including former US Attorney General Edwin Meese, Heritage Foundation President Edwin Feulner, and Buckley, founder of the National Review.

So now Regnery is publishing Josh Hawley’s book. Is Hawley even aware of the chains he is forging here?

Probably. He probably thinks they’re awesome.

The Regnery connection

Regnery Publishing has been on my radar for a long, long time. They’re the go-to publishing house for far-right-wing cranks everywhere: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, every angry loon who mainlines AM talk radio, or babbles on AM talk radio, can turn to Regnery to take the fevered hash festering in their brains and turn it into ink on paper. I’ve been tracking their poison for so long because another collection of kooks using their services are the creationists. The Discovery Institute loves them some Regnery. Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design was published with them, as was Icons of Evolution. If you want to lie about science, history, or politics, Regnery will publish it.

But they have another connection. William H. Regnery II has been using the money from his publishing house to promote open racism.

By 1999, Regnery had come to believe that the only future for white people in North America was a reconfigured continent with a white-only homeland carved out of the former United States. He began consorting with Ku Klux Klan apologists, Holocaust deniers, eugenics boosters, and immigration foes. He set up two white nationalist nonprofits and steered money into them. He published fringe-right journals and books. Through his family’s famed conservative publishing house, Regnery had been on a first-name basis with the cream of the Republican establishment. But by 2006, his public views on race left him ostracized from the GOP.

Isn’t that cute? Remember the GOP back in 2006? Odious and dumb, but hey, at least then they repudiated outright, open association with naked racism, even if we all knew they were associated with it quietly, behind the scenes. They ostracized Regnery, at least.

But then, the very next sentence:

Now, he’s back. Working behind the scenes, the retired Chicago business executive has played an important role in making his ultra-right views a part of America’s political conversation in the era of Trump. In what he has described as his crowning political achievement, Regnery discovered Richard Spencer, the mediagenic agitator who invented the term “alt-right.” In 2011, Regnery made him the frontman for his white nationalist think tank, the National Policy Institute, providing Spencer the platform to launch the alt-right movement.

William! Don’t sell yourself short! Richard “Punchable” Spencer is not your only accomplishment: thanks to Regnery Publishing’s contributions to propaganda, Republicans hate education and Republicans hate science, you’ve got a buffoon in the White House, and congress is a nest of vermin. You have burned so very very brightly, William. You’ve done extraordinary things. Revel in your time. Don’t think about what comes next.

But until they are defeated, the Regnerys of the world will continue to promote hateful nonsense.

The white race may go from master of the universe to an anthropological curiosity, he warned the audience. Later he remarked, Whites are unique in welcoming racial aliens into their midst.

Delusional white people will continue to think in terms of master and slave, as they always have. Human beings, however, will continue to meld in all their diversity in complex patterns of descent, as they always have, because all those “racial aliens” are just people.

The problem is all those master race assholes who cannot welcome the fellow human beings in their midst.

I hope you weren’t eager to get Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book

D’Souza made a stupid, and clearly debunked, “documentary”, 2000 Mules, in which he claimed Democrats smuggled in crates of faked ballots to steal the election. Now he’s trying to turn it into a book. Oops, a snag.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book version of “2000 Mules,” based on the film that makes widely debunked claims that people were paid to dump fraudulent ballots at collection boxes in key 2020 election states, was abruptly recalled by the publisher Monday, the eve of its release.

Recalled? Publication delayed? You might think that’s a small thing to have happen, except…the publisher is Regnery. Regnery don’t care. Regnery publishes the most godawful stupid right-wing garbage without a qualm.

Now I really want to know what kind of garbage is in the first publication of that book that would make even Regnery gag.

The Discovery Institute just keeps plugging along, pointlessly

Ahh, the Discovery Institute. A patent pseudoscientific think-tank funded by right-wing millionaires. Doesn’t that make you want to trust them?

They are now cheerfully leaping onto the anti-vax quack bandwagon — it’s where the money is, nowadays. They’ve come out with a new book, The Price of Panic, that tries to claim that the problem isn’t the pandemic, it’s the government’s response to the pandemic.

The human cost of the emergency response to COVID-19 has far outweighed the benefits. That’s the sobering verdict of a trio of scholars—a biologist, a statistician, and a philosopher— in this comprehensive assessment of the worst panic-induced disaster in history.

I think there are about 673,000 Americans who might argue with that. Oops, they can’t — they’re dead. You can always trust those bozos to get everything wrong.

The book is published by Regnery. Enough said.

Stephen Meyer is also out there pushing his new book, Return of the God Hypothesis. It is, of course, boring garbage. I’ve read a couple of Meyer’s books, but I’m not going to bother with this one — it’s all tedious, tendentious, repetitive nonsense, and all of his books sound the same. He might as well call the next one Bride of the God Hypothesis, then Son of the God Hypothesis, and maybe I’ll express some interest when Abbott and Costello Meet the God Hypothesis comes out.

Anyway, Meyer wrote an advertisement masquerading as a press release pretending to announce a serious idea, and the New York Post snapped it up. It does give you a taste of his bad argument.

As crazy as it all sounds, scientists have long posited the possibility of aliens on our planet. In fact, Francis Crick (who along with James Watson won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule) once theorized that life on Earth was “deliberately transmitted” by intelligent extra terrestrials. Far from being scorned, Crick’s “Directed panspermia” theory was presented at a conference organized by Carl Sagan in 1971 and later published as a scientific paper.

One of the hallmarks of a Meyer book is the constant name-dropping. Oooh, Francis Crick! Famous prestigious scientist indulged in some fantastical speculation, and it got presented at a meeting (this is less impressive than you might think) and published! <swoon> It must be good stuff! No, it’s not. It’s a wild-ass idea that went nowhere. Crick is not famous as a panspermist.

I have theorized that life arose when a Space Winnebago flushed their toilet tanks while visiting Hadean Earth. It doesn’t mean anything. It is not evidence for anything. Unfortunately, I haven’t won a Nobel Prize so I haven’t been invited to fumigate a conference hall with my brain farts.

Oooh, Bill Gates next!

Watson and Crick discovered that chemical subunits in DNA function like letters in a written language or digital symbols in computer code. As Bill Gates explains, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

Bill Gates is a college dropout who knows nothing about biology, and who got rich on predatory business practices. He is not an authority on this subject. DNA is not like a computer program. It’s a misleading metaphor, applied by a guy who made computers his business. If he’d gotten rich off model railroad gear, he’d be claiming that DNA was just like a track, with switches.

How about Richard Dawkins? He’s got a little more credibility on this subject (but not much, and diminishing every time he opens his mouth).

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins echoes this assessment, noting the “machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” In a recent tweet, he confessed to being knocked “sideways with wonder at the miniaturized intricacy of the data-processing machinery in the living cell.”

No, it’s not. He’s wrong. What does it even mean to speak of “machine code” of genes? Back in the ancient times of the 1970s, I sometimes wrote short bits of machine code, and I fail to see the appropriateness of the comparison. The cell and its genes are not computer-like at all, and it does not contain “data-processing machinery”, except in the vaguest sense of the phrase. This is word salad, written by someone who got a bit too excited about a metaphor. It serves Meyer’s purpose, though, so he goes ahead and uses it.

His purpose is to twist science, even Richard Dawkins’ philosophical atheism, into support for his favored assertion.

Believers in this kind of intelligence greatly outnumber believers in alien astronauts. They have long called this intelligence behind life and the universe by a different name.

They call it God.

It’s totally dishonest, of course. That’s written in the “machine code” of the Discovery Institute.

Meyer isn’t even a very good philosopher. He’s got one note that he bangs on, off-key, while desperately waving at out-of-context quotes from people who actually would strongly disagree with him.

Skip it. Ignore everything from that think-tank of lies.

Shermer: Reliably wrong every time

People still pay attention to this conservative fraudster?

Skip it. Irreversible Damage is simply more right-wing hysteria. The premise is that the transeses are transing our kids against their will — the usual moral panic we saw about the gayses recruiting kids with their flamboyant, ever-so-appealing gayness. It’s a garbage book by someone who writes for the Federalist and other such reactionary venues. I’m not going to watch it, but I’m pretty sure Shermer won’t be doing a critical, or dare I say it, skeptical interview.

Watch this instead.

If you don’t want to watch a video, here’s a solid critical review of Shrier’s book. It’s published by Regnery? Yuck. She didn’t interview any of the kids she describes, but rather talked to their parents, who are very upset that their kids were transgender? Jesus.

We could be another Portugal!

Some on the right are now aware that it was a bad idea to stage an attempted conservative revolution with a bumbling incompetent as a figurehead leading a mob of stupid mooks. Oops. We need to step back. We need to recalculate. We need to look around for better role models. We need a guy who represents true conservative values.

So over on The American Conservative, Michael Warren Davis (he has a book coming out from Regnery so you know exactly how he thinks) has found his hero. It’s Antonio Salazar, the authoritarian dictator of Portugal for 36 years. He was definitely an intelligent person, he oversaw many improvements in Portuguese life, and he definitely made the nation more stable…by ending all political dissent, staging nothing but sham elections, and ruling as an autocrat. If stability is a conservative ideal, he certainly represented that while he was alive. Unfortunately, once he was dead the Portuguese people had the Carnation Revolution in 1974 to enact civil rights and free elections, which was kind of a repudiation of the Salazar situation. So stability for as long as the strong man has his fist clenched, but once it relaxes in death, upheaval.

He also had some strong views: he opposed fascism, and maintained Portugal’s neutrality in WWII, in spite of sharing a lot of ideals with Nazi Germany (“Deus, Pátria e Família“, “God, Fatherland, and Family”, which sounds awfully familiar). He also opposed socialism, communism, and democracy, though, so that’s a bit of a mixed bag.

On the American Conservative, they’re waiting for our Salazar. Trump wasn’t it. In an essay full of praise for a dictator, Davis concludes that we just need a benevolent autocrat.

Yet Salazar’s example offers a different kind of post-liberal order to those offered by left- and right-wing ideologues. Salazarism, if there is such a thing, is a kind of paternalistic traditionalism. Either a weaker or a more “visionary” leader couldn’t have spared Portugal the excesses of totalitarianism. Salazar was, in his own way, a moderate.

Summing up the spirit of Salazarism, Gallagher incisively quotes the Israeli conservative thinker Yoram Hazony: “Where a people is incapable of self-discipline, a mild government will only encourage licentiousness and division, hatred and violence, eventually forcing a choice between civil war and tyranny. This means that the best an undisciplined people can hope for is a benevolent autocrat.”

Events of the last year may prove Hazony right. If we Americans lack the self-discipline necessary for self-government, if liberalism is off the table, the only alternative to a tyrant like Lenin or Hitler may be a man like Salazar: a paternalistic traditionalist, a philosopher-king.

You should find that chilling. The “smart” conservatives in our country think it would be just fine and dandy to get rid of elections if it allows tradition and paternalism to thrive. They aren’t upset with Trump for attempting a coup, they’re mad because he did it in such a half-assed way an bungled the effort to throw out an election. If he’d succeeded, they’d now be rationalizing the wreckage of our democracy as a conservative triumph.

Normalizing racism

A guy named Richard Spencer organized a conference this past weekend for his organization, the inocuously named National Policy Institute. This is how NPI describes themselves.

NPI is an independent organization dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world. It was founded in 2005 by William Regnery and Samuel T. Francis, in conjunction with Louis R. Andrews.

Can we knock off the bullshit? All this is is the rebranding of white supremacy movements and the whitewashing of unabashed racism. None of this is about protecting the “heritage, identity, and future” of white people; we white people are doing just fine and can luxuriate in our privileged status. I don’t have to get off my butt to defend my good fortune, I can sit back and take it for granted.

This is about putting down other human beings who would like — and deserve — to share equally in all of the rights and privileges we already have. It’s about denying to others what we regard as our due.

They’re succeeding. The chilling thing is how easily the media are manipulated, and how willingly they bend to their efforts to recast themselves as something new and completely different from the KKK and skinheads. This article in the LA Times is a perfect example.

This was the white nationalist lobby — the alt-right — coming to town for a victory lap after Donald Trump’s election, assuming what they see as their rightful place influencing the new administration.

“An awakening among everyone has occurred with this Trump election,” Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist think tank, said during opening remarks. “We’re not quite the establishment now, but I think we should start acting like it.”

Several hundred pro-white nationalists showed up for the day-long confab, buoyed by Trump’s popularity and the role they now intend to play in bringing white identity politics to Washington.

Sitting around conference tables, the formally dressed men more resembled Washington lobbyists than the robed Ku Klux Klansmen or skinhead toughs that often represent white supremacists, though they share many familiar views.

I don’t assume the reporter is at all sympathetic to their cause, but she willingly accepts their rebranding and their movement into the mainstream, as if it is just the new fact of life that must be objectively reported rather than opposed. Nowhere in the piece are the words “race” or “racism” or “racist” used. You won’t find the words “black” or “Latin” used, either — isn’t it odd how an article about the rise of racist fascists that takes the angle of journalistic abstraction doesn’t, in this case, even bother to get the perspective of anyone who is the target of this focused hatred? The opinions of the white people attending this conference about white people are simply assumed to be all that needs to be brought up. “He said/she said” journalism so readily becomes “We said/they’re ignored” journalism when race becomes an issue.

Also chilling: this remark by one of the attendees.

“We are the epicenter of the right now in terms of intellect,” said 30-year-old Nathan Damigo of California. “We are the culture creators of the right.”

“Intellect”? Jesus. These “scientific” racists are always so ignorant of basic biology and no one in these articles ever bothers to question their claim to “intellectualism”. There’s not one bit of it anywhere in their rationalizations — it’s all pseudoscience and aggressive posturing. “Sporting the same haircut of short sides and back with a familiar flop on top” like a uniform does not make you clever.

But I’ll agree that they are the new “culture creators of the right”. The right is building a new culture that is openly comfortable with racists. They are proudly making American conservatism synonymous with racism, while at the same time sniffing indignantly if you dare to point out that fact. And we’ve got lots of liberals going along with this rebranding, protesting that we’re going to offend a lot of voters if we are so brazen as to recognize that the views they are espousing are in fact racist.

It also reminds me of this infamous passage from 2004 about the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Do not let them get away with using a blasé media to normalize their delusions. Remember how disastrous that reshaping of perceived reality was in the Bush administration, and realize that their new efforts are going to be just as destructive.

They’re racists. They’re fascists. Their goal is to undermine civil liberties and loot the country to benefit themselves and their ugly, hateful kin. You can’t honestly report on Richard Spencer or Steve Bannon or Donald Trump without stating this fact.

White supremacists are getting a facelift?

At least, that’s what this guy Richard Spencer is claiming that he’s doing, trying to add a little intellectual respectability to a small gang of bigots. From this account of a conference the racists recently had, though, it sounds like the same old crap.

“If you cannot be for your own people, who can you be for?” one young man who gave his name as Helmut Schmidt said as a reason for attending the conference. “The reality is when white people are the minority in this country, it is going to be real bad.”

But really the conference was open to any number of overlapping topics that might attract disaffected white youngsters. Jack Donovan, an anti-feminist writer and “advocate for the resurgence of tribalism and manly virtue,” served up his shtick.

Donovan has argued that feminists are trying to create  “gender-neutral utopias” that will make men into “doughy bonobos and chunky Chaz Bonos playing out their endless manic-depressive melodramas in a big bean-flicking circle of sterility, sickness and desperation.”

“Do black people as a group care what happens to white people as a group? Does a Mexican dad with three babies care about whether some white kid from the burbs gets a summer landscaping job? Of course not,” Donovan said during his presentation, adding later, “You cannot play fair with people who don’t care if you get wiped off the map.”

Turn that last sentence around. Why should anyone play fair with white chauvinists who only care about brown people as nannies and gardners?

One message I got, though, was that the facelift seems to involve adding resentment against independent women to the stew of racial hatred that they usually tap into. It’s always been there, but in this story it’s pretty overt: white women must support the race by bearing lots of white babies.

You can find much more about the unsavory Richard Spencer at the SPLC. He’s currently head of the National Policy Institute, a racist think-tank founded by William Regnery, the far right wing publisher who also publishes a great many books by the Discovery Institute authors like Wells, Wiker, Richards, Gonzalez, Weikart, etc. It’s rather ironic that they love to publish books accusing evolution of being a Nazi plot fomenting Hitlerian ideas of eugenics, while at the same time promoting racial ideas that would have been right at home in Hitler’s government.

Two book lists

I’ve been sent two lists of “10 Books That Screwed Up the World”, and I’m not very impressed with either of them. The first is from a new book by Benjamin Wanker Wiker of the same title, published by Regnery Press, the imprint of right-wing wackaloons everywhere. Here’s Wiker’s list:

  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Discourse on Method, Descartes
  • Leviathan, Hobbes
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • The Descent of Man, Darwin
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey

Here’s another list, which seems to be inspired by Wiker’s, but with a few substitutions.

  • Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer and Sprenger
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead
  • The Prince, Machiavelli
  • Mein Kampf, Hitler
  • The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger
  • Democracy and Education, Dewey
  • Baby and Child Care, Spock
  • The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
  • Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • Darwin’s Black Box, Behe

Bleh. A list of books that screwed up the world ought to include books that have actually had some major impact for the worse on the lives of large numbers of people: I can definitely see that for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and the Malleus Maleficarum. Others, not so much. Coming of Age in Samoa may have confused the discipline of anthropology for a while, but putting it on the same list as Mein Kampf is simply ridiculous. The work of Marx has been potent and maybe deserves to be on these lists because we’re still living with the ideological struggle that it was part of…but really, it ought to include both sides, and Adam Smith’s work doesn’t seem to be here.

Darwin’s book is a science text that describes an empirical reality. To claim that it screwed up the world is like declaring that Newton’s Principia, because it described difficult facts, hurt us. It’s only on the list because Wiker is a Discovery Institute cretin.

Kinsey is on the list because he makes homophobic wingnuts feel uncomfortably icky. I don’t think that making the likes of Benjamin Wiker feel all squirmy in his pants qualifies as screwing up the world.

And Behe? You’ve got to be kidding. His book is inconsequential noise, error after error larded with silly egotism. It’s the work of a popular crackpot; if you’re going to include that, then we need to include the works of Velikovsky and Chopra and every astrologer, acupuncturist, homeopathist, quack, and faith healer ever written.

And most damning of all, it is impossible to take these lists seriously when they’ve left off the works that have been overwhelmingly influential, incredibly widely read, and have led billions of people into delusion and stupidity: the Christian bible and the Koran. Toss in the Book of Mormon and Dianetics and any holy book you can imagine as equally fit for condemnation. Isn’t it glaringly obvious that both lists omit any work that is explicitly religious? It’s another example of unthinking privilege handed to theological gobbledygook.