Following the 2008 election, one positive glimmer that Republicans found in Barack Obama’s victory was all the fodder his freshly inaugurated face created for conservative authors and publishers. The right-wing publishing machine kicked into overdrive throughout the Obama years, with pundits like Dinesh D’Souza, Michelle Malkin, Ben Shapiro, and Bill O’Reilly writing hit after hit targeting the Democratic president. But under Joe Biden and the current Democratic administration, conservative publishers are having to look elsewhere to find popular topics for their scathing books, as The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins noted in a Wednesday dispatch on the conservative media complex’s search for a “new bogeyman” to make up for Biden’s “relative dullness.”
Many of the upcoming and recent releases from right-wing publishers are aimed at the GOP’s more abstract enemies, like “cancel culture,” “wokeness,” antifa, and COVID restrictions, as Coppins points out. These titles include Alex Berenson’s Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives; Ben Shapiro’s The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent; and David Horowitz’s The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America––a book that includes every conservatives’ most hated Democrats on the cover, such as Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Bernie Sanders. Noticeably absent: Joe Biden. As one conservative editor explained to The Atlantic, “In the past, it’s been like taking candy from a baby to write a book about the Democratic president,” but now, “nobody is trying.”
In comparison, Horowitz’s first anti-Obama book, entitled Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, released in 2009, featured a picture of the 44th president engulfed in red alongside Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Saul Alinsky. (It stands to reason that Obama’s face made its way onto so many popular conservative title covers due to him being the first Black president, so portraying him as menacingly as possible was sure to catch the target audience’s attention.) Atop D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage, Obama can be seen glaring at the reader while veiled behind a blood-red filter. During the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton became the right’s book cover bogeyman. But for now, Biden has been spared the sinister book jacket treatment. It seems that the conservative base’s perception of Biden as America’s bewildered grandpa is one reason for this. Eric Nelson, the executive editor of HarperCollins’ conservative vertical Broadside Books, remarked to The Atlantic that Fox News viewers don’t believe “that Joe Biden is in charge of the country,” adding, “If somebody came to me and was like, ‘I have a book on Biden’s secret plan to destroy America,’ I would ask, ‘How many times does the word nap appear in the index?’”
Instead, conservative authors are more interested in tackling leftist policy agendas, like the Green New Deal, despite the ruling Democratic Party almost certainly not entertaining them. Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin’s next book, entitled American Marxism, will highlight “how today’s progressives—who have overtaken Liberals in setting the agenda for the American Left—have used Cultural Marxism” to divide America, while also informing readers on “the widespread brainwashing of students, the anti-American purposes of Critical Race Theory, and the Green New Deal,” according to its publisher.
Another obstacle that conservative publishers will have to overcome in the coming years is the fact that Donald Trump, who spent the past four years as the most sought-after book promoter, is no longer on Twitter to cosign and boost upcoming titles all the way to best-seller lists. He no longer even has a blog.
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