Free Republic

Routine Deceits American Theocracy’s disingenuous characterizations of Israel. A review by Gil Troy As experts continue debunking the polemical paper demonizing the “Israel Lobby” written by a Harvard dean and a University of Chicago political scientist, Kevin Phillips’s latest book, American Theocracy, has been wowing critics and climbing best-seller lists. A lead New York Times Book Review hailed Phillips’s work as the “most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years” as well as “extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.” Yet, for all this “extensive” research, Phillips...

From oil to AIDS to Armageddon, liberals are buying the bizarre claims set forth in "American Theocracy." There's always been a strain of paranoia running through American politics. Back in the mid-1960s, when the right felt powerless, the John Birch Society thrived. Today, when the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips, whose book "American Theocracy" is in its fifth week on the New York Times' best-seller list. Phillips' method is pretty conventional for conspiracists -- he takes a single issue or set of data points and constructs an all-explaining story line to show how...