Idiot America

How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

By: Charles P. Pierce

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist’s caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.

The three Great Premises of Idiot America: · Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units; anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough; "fact" is that which enough people believe. And "truth" is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Charles Pierce has led a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, and now it’s time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed. With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.

With Idiot America, Pierce’s thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that, somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

©2009 Charles P. Pierce (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“A raucous rant against the armies of the right…. Pierce is at his scathing, insightful best.” ( Boston Globe)

Great book, but too true

This is an amazing account of the demise of intelligence in America. This tells about how Americans are easily bamboozled by charlatans. Pierce talks about how the far right Christians have eschewed science for creationism that they often re-label intelligent design. There is nothing intelligent about it.

I'm sad thinking about how much worse we've gotten since this book was written.

The cranks now are in charge of Idiot America

Where does Idiot America rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Most of the book's I read are mysteries, so this book was a great change of pace. I really did enjoy listening.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Not a character book, but I really did enjoy learning about the "cranks" of America's past.

Which character – as performed by Bronson Pinchot – was your favorite?

Not really answerable.

Must Listen

This should be a must listen for every high school senior. Want to know why the media is a mess? Your answers are here. This book made me mad, bummed me out, and broadened my view.

The stupidity it points out might bring you down, but this book is important and very good.

beyond knowledge and mental competence

Americans *are* exceptional. We're exceptionally jingoistic, bellicose, misogynistic, self-infatuated, ignorant, illiterate, sexually enamoured of instruments of death, and so phenomenally hubristic that we presume to consider ourselves "exceptional," whereas we enjoy a Gini Index of Wealth Inequality squarely athwart that of Rwanda! (factoid taken from that left-wing, conspiratorial document, The CIA Handbook) To be fair, it's not really our fault. The malevolent plutocracy has been engaged in a forty-year campaign so to undercut American education, that we've churned out a hopelessly stultified populace eager to wave flags, root for unnecessary wars, and cheer on their own economic evisceration as we obliterate the middle class and they all move to jobs flipping burgers. Exceptional!

Pierce assembles a painfully graphic pastiche of the resultant cretinism rampant in the land, and of course, none of the dinosaur-saddling troglodytes will comprehend a word, nor will the vicious kakistocrats who've overseen the national lobotomy care a single whit. But it's worth reading (for the residue of us who still retain that faculty)... partly for its mordant humor, and partly for its historical significance as a requiem for American sentience.

A must listen.

A passionate defense of the enlightenment values of our founding fathers. Pierce hammers the damage the elevation of cranks has done to our ability to make informed decisions. However unlike other books on the subject Pierce's work engages this topic with a mixture of humor and seriousness that is very enthralling. The narration is very well done. I highly recommend this book.

Audiobook is the best

The story was great. Fantastic history lesson, however you need to listen to the audiobook. The narration is a fantastic theatrical experience and the emphasis on specific words or phrases really helps you delve into the mind of Idiot America.

Didn't care for it

3 stars is generous and I'm only giving it three stars because I listened about 25% and decided that I had listened to enough.

I prefer objective factual information, this book did not have enough of it to support it's points. I just felt like he took a bunch of cheap shots at conservatives the whole way through, inflating outlier events/people that he mentions as if they were an accurate representation of the entire conservative community.

I just felt like there was too much subjectivity in his criticisms, too much appeal to the emotion rather than to logic. So, I wouldn't recommend this book, had I listened to >25%, I am relatively sure that I would feel justified in going down to one star.

The funniest scariest book you will ever read

If ever there was a more prescient book, I've not read it. Think about today.

Comfort in madness

In reading Pierce’s expose of the disintegration of American reason and the repaving with gut-induced bile from right-wing idiots, I found great comfort. I thought that i was going insane.

Waiting for the inevitable sequel...

“Idiot-er America: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”

So good and so depressingly appropriate for our current times (2020). Great writing AND reading. Thank you for this!