Blinded by the Right |
Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (ISBN 1400047285) is a 2002 book written by former conservative Journalist David Brock detailing his departure from the conservative movement. It is also the story of his coming out as a gay man. In the book, he recounts visiting gay bars with Matt Drudge and other conservatives.
The subtitle alludes to Barry Goldwater s The Conscience of a Conservative , which helped define the modern conservative movement in the United States.
=Book Summary=
Brock starts the book by recalling his days at U.C. Berkeley and how he was turned off by hecklers at a speech by then United States ambassador to the United Nations, Jean Kirkpatrick. Brock s main attraction to conservatism was his disdain for communism.
After college, Brock moved with his then partner, which he called in the book Andrew to conceal the real identity, to Washington D.C., where Brock worked for a couple of right wing publications: The Washington Times and The American Spectator. Brock claims while he was working for those publications he thought he was doing honest journalism, but in hindsight Brock admits that he never corroborated his facts.
Brock then writes that while working for The American Spectator, he wrote a very negative article on Anita Hill, which he later expanded into a book called The Real Anita Hill . The book made him quite popular in conservative movement. Later in the beeok Blinded by the Right , Brock tells that he later found out that many of the uncorroborated facts he put in the book turned out to be false.
After Bill Clinton came to power, Brock recounts how he was assigned to write the Troopergate story about four Arkansas state troopers, whom Brock claims in his book had a grudge to hold against Clinton, so they made up far fetched stories about affairs that most could never be corroborated. Brock claims that he was given assurances that the troopers would not get paid for telling their stories, but later found out that he was deceived and they were paid behind his back by Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled The American Spectator and The Arkansas Project, a secret project to dig up dirt on Clinton.
In the book Brock says that he made sure to conceal the identities of the women identified by the troopers, with the exception of one woman, named Paula. Brock thought that by not revealing her last name, it would be enough to conceal her identity, however, Brock did not take into account that Little Rock is small enought that eventually her identity would be revealed as Paula Jones, which lead to her lawsuit.
Follwing the troopergate story, Brock wrote a book about Hillary Clinton. Unlike the Anita Hill book, Brock decided not to put anything in the book that he could not corroborate. The book therefore turned out to be not as critical of Hillary Clinton as it was promised to be (Brock claims that conservatives planned on the book being so damming as to influence the outcome of the 1996 presidential election).
Brock writes that the Hillary Clinton book was the beginning of his fall from grace in the conservative movement. What finally got him to leave the conservative movement was the movements intolerance towards homosexuals. Brock had reluctantly come out of the closet a couple of years prior to writing the Hillary Clinton book, so after his book on Hillary Clinton came out, he was shunned by many in the movement.
Brock ends the book by saying that in 2000 he cast a vote for Al Gore, the first time he voted since he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984 when he was a student at Berkeley. Brock says that during the period in which he did not vote, he rationalized his non-voting as
=External links=
==Media Appearance==
*[http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/04/26/cf.crossfire/ CNN Crossfire] April 26, 2002
==Positive Reviews==
*[http://www.democraticunderground.com/books/02/brock.html A review by James M. Kehl] at Democratic Underground
==Negative Reviews==
*[http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/25/books-cooper.php Blinded by the Fight - The miseducation of David Brock, snot-faced warrior for the right] - LA Times review. *[http://slate.msn.com/id=2063759 David Brock, Liar: A lifelong habit proves hard to break.] in slate.com by Timothy Noah **[http://fray.slate.msn.com/id=3936&m=3209123 Brock s Response]|
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