How a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, complete with dysfunction, scandal, and crime.

Award-winning journalist and documentary videographer Max Blumenthal has been behind some of the most sensational (and funniest) exposés of Republican excesses. Whether it was his revelation of Sarah Palin’s involvement with a Kenyan pastor who boasted of epic battles with witches, his shocking reports on rapture-ready fanatic Pastor John Hagee’s ties to senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman, or his exposé of the eccentric theocratic multimillionaire behind California’s Prop 8 anti-gay-marriage initiative, Blumenthal has become one of the most important and most constantly cited journalists on how a fringe movement became the Republican Party mainstream.

Republican Gomorrah—Blumenthal’s remarkable, muckraking debut—is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal, and crime from the heart of the movement that runs the Republican Party. He describes the people and the beliefs that establishment Republicans—like John McCain—need to kowtow to if they have any hope of running for president, and how moderates have been systematically purged from party ranks. He shows why the unqualified Sarah Palin was the party’s only logical choice and how her most fanatical supporters will be setting the strategy for the Republican assault on the Obama administration. Blumenthal warns that the Christian right will quietly exploit the widespread financial misery caused by the economic meltdown while mainstream media pundits churn out faddish and unfounded tales of the movement’s death.

Not only an exposé, Republican Gomorrah reveals that many of the movement’s leading figures are united by more than political campaigns; they are bound together by a shared sensibility rooted in private trauma. Their lives have been stained by crisis and scandal—depression, mental illness, extramarital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, addiction to drugs and pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. For the most zealous foot soldiers of the right, the crusade to cleanse the land of sin was in fact a quest to purify their souls.

Praise for Republican Gomorrah and Max Blumenthal

“With scarcely more than a pith helmet, a notebook, and a tattered copy of Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm’s great study of authoritarian psychology, the dauntless Max Blumenthal set forth years ago to explore the dank forests of American Christianism. Now he has returned to civilization, bringing back a fine collection of shrunken heads and a riveting account of a religio-political subculture that’s even weirder than you thought it was. Republican Gomorrah is an irresistible combination of anthropology and psychopathology that exerts the queasy fascination of (let’s face it) something very like pornography.”
—Hendrik Hertzberg, New Yorker

“A brave and resourceful reporter adept at turning over rocks that public-relations-savvy Christian conservative leaders would prefer remain undisturbed.”
—Rick Perlstein, New York Times Book Review

“Max Blumenthal’s bold and brash reporting style should not overshadow his keen understanding of the extremist ideology that passes for ‘conservatism’ in America today. A witty writer who thinks for himself, he shows the mainstream media where the story is, not vice versa. And his short videos have transformed the conservative crack-up into must-see TV.”
—Joe Conason