As a bookworm, I’m naturally the obsessive compulsive buyer that Barnes & Noble seeks to attract. But one of my recent trips to their Frederick, MD store showed me just how much the bookstore giant was willing to go to sneak anti-Trump agitprop into their customers’ information diet.
As I was checking out some books for purchase in last month, the cashier hawked his company’s “Monthly Pick” to me called Cultish published in 2021 by author Amanda Montell, who apparently became known in part for her third-wave feminist drivel Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language (2019).
You can already tell where this is going. I’ve never heard of Cultish nor expressed previous interest in buying it until the cashier waved it in my face. But I’ll admit I was morbidly curious after the cashier’s sales pitch. After all: I make a living doing media analysis and I’m no stranger to the exhausting number of lowbrow Trump-Is-A-Threat-To-Democracy cheesy-page-turners that plague Barnes & Noble bookshelves.
Buried in the fourth chapter of the book — purported to be a deep-dive into the psychology and rhetoric that guides cult and cult-like movements —there was one of the stupidest comparisons I’ve ever witnessed in print. According to Montell, President Donald Trump is like Jim Jones — yeah, the frenetic maniac responsible for the “Drink-the-Kool-Aid” Jonestown Massacre of 1978, which killed over 900 people through murder-suicide in Guyana.
One of their supposedly shared traits that Montell saw fit to highlight was the fact that they’re both “white” men with “booming, exaggerated baritones” that have invoked “big topics like God and government” at some point or another from the bully pulpit. In turn, snorted Montell, “many listeners are likely to listen by default — to hear the deep pitch and ‘standard’ English dialect and trust it without much questioning.” I wish I was joking.
Read the relevant passage from Amanda Montell’s book Cultish below.
What a way to insult the 70-plus million people who voted for Trump in 2020.
Apparently, Barnes & Noble had no problem nudging its 18 million members across its 600 U.S. stores to buy this garbage exercise in intellectual contempt from the “Wordslut” gal, to borrow a term from another book I purchased there by economist Richard Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein Nudge (2009).
According to Montell, “Cultish language isn’t a magic bullet or lethal poison; it’s more like a placebo pill.” Okay? She then banked on an essay collection by leftist comedian Lindy West to spew, “As long as someone is white, male, telling us to pay attention to him, we’ll follow ‘even the most obviously bumbling con artist dumbass ever birthed by the universe,’ West says.”
Montell then took it a step further and lumped Trump in with another notorious American serial killer, peppering him with adjectives ripped straight out of the unhinged leftist lexicon: “Even rude, mediocre, murderous Ted Bundy. Even buffoonish Fyre Festival fraudster Billy MacFarland. Even racist fascist misogynist Donald Trump. Even diabolical despotic Jim Jones.”
That’s three wild-eyed adjectives in one sentence. This doesn’t even qualify as a clever polemic. Trump and Jones couldn’t be more diametrically opposed, starting on ideological grounds. This was evidenced by Jones himself during the infamous “Death Tape” where he can audibly be heard urging frightened cultists into drinking cyanide in the name of communism:
Stop this hysterics… This is not the way for people who are socialistic Communists to die … no way for us to die. We must die with some dignity … If you have any respect at all… Are we black, proud and Socialist, or what are we? Now stop this nonsense, don’t carry this on any more, you’re exciting your children.
Leaving aside the utter absurdity of comparing Trump to a psychopathic murderer, since when did Trump have anything to do with peaching the poisonous ideals of socialism and communism?
Montell must have known that putting Trump in the same sentence as Jim Jones was insane. She admitted that “it isn’t always productive to make blanket statements equating Donald Trump (or any problematic leader) to Jim Jones. That’s chiefly because it’s not the most useful way to evaluate their specific danger.”
But then she pivoted: “I am not the first person to point out the similarities between Jones and Trump, but I highlight their overlapping oratories more as an invitation to consider the precise language forms that contributed to Trump’s deceptive and violent charisma, not to drum up fear that the man is capable of orchestrating a mass poisoning in Guyana (I doubt Trump could even name which continent Guyana is on).”
This sounds awfully like the cacophony of excuses we at MRC hear any time a deranged media talking head shouts Trump is Hitler from their platforms and wants to be taken seriously.
If Montell wants to behave like a “Wordslut,” she should have no problem embracing that moniker on her own without Barnes & Noble putting its own endorsement on her work and isolating its customers who happen to support Trump.
Now, to be fair: the cashier who hawked Montell’s book was just doing his job, but this should serve as a lesson to Barnes & Noble proper to be more judicious about which books its leadership chooses to feature as the corporation’s monthly “pick(s).”
I — and hopefully other conservative journalists — will be watching more closely from now on.
