Ten winters ago, Chris Hedges authored a book bearing the unsubtle, positively hysterical title “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” It was published not by some obscure fringe outfit one step removed from the mimeograph but by Simon & Schuster, which in the book’s marketing copy advertised its terror that Christians of Pat Robertson’s ilk presented “a very real threat to our freedom and our way of life.” The book was reviewed respectfully, though not always positively, everywhere from the New York Times to O: The Oprah Magazine, which is no celebrity vanity project but a valuable part of the Hearst publishing empire. Hedges, a product of Loomis Chaffee School, Colgate, and Harvard, went on to win a Pulitzer prize as part of the New York Times team covering international terrorism.
The book’s argument — that a secretive movement of authoritarian Christians organized along the lines of the great totalitarian movements of the 20th century was on the verge of seizing power through violence — was preposterous, pure conspiracy-theory nonsense of the Bilderberg and Bohemian Grove variety. But that was not of interest to Francine Prose (real name!) of O, who wrote that Hedges had uncovered nested conspiracies “that pose a clear and present danger to our precious and fragile republic.”
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