The new Puritans are here, and they’re coming for your lifestyle, your freedoms, and your fun. In this book, Noah Rothman–one of the best authors in the country today–lays out the case for just why the censorious Left is winning the day, and why the future of the country relies on rejecting their tyrannical vision for tomorrow.” — Ben Shapiro, author and host of The Ben Shapiro Show
“Living through a political and cultural realignment is fascinating, bewildering, and maddening. Noah Rothman nails these disparate thoughts to the page in his new book. He sets the reader up for finding a place to sit when the music stops on this current cycle of change and the inevitable ones that will come next. The Rise of the New Puritans does not scold; rather, it is a book that lifts up the best of our American independent spirit and reinforces the love we have for our country.” — Dana Perino, White House press secretary to President George W. Bush
“The best book I’ve read on the absurdity and futility of the woke movement. Rothman brilliantly and methodically exposes the vapidity of these New Puritans with too-nuts-to-be-true examples of those they target—from poets, knitters, and bird-watchers to chefs and home decorators. No one is safe in these modern-day witch trials until we realize the secret to dismantling them: mockery. Absolutely brilliant, utterly engrossing. You will laugh out loud and shout these stories from the rooftops as Rothman reminds us that sanctimonious cults of misery have historically short shelf lives.” — Megyn Kelly, author, journalist, and host of The Megyn Kelly Show
“Republicans long ago mastered the art of moral preening in the public square. In The Rise of the New Puritans, Noah Rothman vividly describes how today’s progressive movement is fueled by a utopian drive to enforce ideological conformity across America. Combined with rising illiberalism on the Far Right, this new Puritanism threatens to undermine some of liberal democracy’s most cherished values. Read Noah Rothman’s book to better understand why.” — Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe
“Mixing sharp, pithy political analysis with old-fashioned reporting, Noah Rothman reveals how progressivism has sucked the excitement out of American life and tainted our politics. Rothman’s a brilliant thinker with a detective’s eye for both detail and motive. And this time he’s gone rogue taking on the Joy Police themselves. This dismantling of the Left’s censorship and hysteria is a must-read.” — Jonah Goldberg, author, syndicated columnist, and editor-in-chief of The Dispatch
“Noah Rothman skewers the people who, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, have a haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time—or, more to the point, transgressing against their petty and inane quasi-religious orthodoxies. Rothman is a first-rate writer and thinker who expertly dissects this blight on our public life and points the way to a better, less censorious American future.” — Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review
“You hold in your hands a mirror on our collective recent history, and it’s pretty awful to gaze upon. Once more into the breach then with Rothman, who is a leading light of the rising generation of public intellectuals filling in the ranks of the exhausted and the exiled after more than two dozen years of constant, relentless boiling politics of rage. Freedom and fun are worth defending, and Rothman has done this for us.” — Hugh Hewitt, author, columnist, and host of The Hugh Hewitt Show
“In chronicling the madness of woke excess, Rothman puts his finger on what makes its practitioners so deeply alienating: It’s not merely that they’re wrong about most things, though they are. It’s that they’re relentlessly, exhaustingly joyless, self-righteous, and devoid of grace. We can either ridicule and fight them or live under their capricious misery. Rothman takes sides—and names.” — Guy Benson, Fox News Channel contributor and host of The Guy Benson Show
Living through a political and cultural realignment is fascinating, bewildering, and maddening. Noah Rothman nails these disparate thoughts to the page in his new book. He sets the reader up for finding a place to sit when the music stops on this current cycle of change and the inevitable ones that will come next. The Rise of the New Puritans does not scold; rather, it is a book that lifts up the best of our American independent spirit and reinforces the love we have for our country.
Republicans long ago mastered the art of moral preening in the public square. In The Rise of the New Puritans, Noah Rothman vividly describes how today’s progressive movement is fueled by a utopian drive to enforce ideological conformity across America. Combined with rising illiberalism on the Far Right, this new Puritanism threatens to undermine some of liberal democracy’s most cherished values. Read Noah Rothman’s book to better understand why.
The new Puritans are here, and they’re coming for your lifestyle, your freedoms, and your fun. In this book, Noah Rothman–one of the best authors in the country today–lays out the case for just why the censorious Left is winning the day, and why the future of the country relies on rejecting their tyrannical vision for tomorrow.
The best book I’ve read on the absurdity and futility of the woke movement. Rothman brilliantly and methodically exposes the vapidity of these New Puritans with too-nuts-to-be-true examples of those they target—from poets, knitters, and bird-watchers to chefs and home decorators. No one is safe in these modern-day witch trials until we realize the secret to dismantling them: mockery. Absolutely brilliant, utterly engrossing. You will laugh out loud and shout these stories from the rooftops as Rothman reminds us that sanctimonious cults of misery have historically short shelf lives.
Noah Rothman skewers the people who, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, have a haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time—or, more to the point, transgressing against their petty and inane quasi-religious orthodoxies. Rothman is a first-rate writer and thinker who expertly dissects this blight on our public life and points the way to a better, less censorious American future.
Mixing sharp, pithy political analysis with old-fashioned reporting, Noah Rothman reveals how progressivism has sucked the excitement out of American life and tainted our politics. Rothman’s a brilliant thinker with a detective’s eye for both detail and motive. And this time he’s gone rogue taking on the Joy Police themselves. This dismantling of the Left’s censorship and hysteria is a must-read.
You hold in your hands a mirror on our collective recent history, and it’s pretty awful to gaze upon. Once more into the breach then with Rothman, who is a leading light of the rising generation of public intellectuals filling in the ranks of the exhausted and the exiled after more than two dozen years of constant, relentless boiling politics of rage. Freedom and fun are worth defending, and Rothman has done this for us.
In chronicling the madness of woke excess, Rothman puts his finger on what makes its practitioners so deeply alienating: It’s not merely that they’re wrong about most things, though they are. It’s that they’re relentlessly, exhaustingly joyless, self-righteous, and devoid of grace. We can either ridicule and fight them or live under their capricious misery. Rothman takes sides—and names.
2022-04-05
A conservative writer attempts to link modern leftist moralizing and asceticism with the austere ideals of the Colonial Puritans.
Granted, the Puritans of yore believed in the perfectibility of humans, attained, in some instances, by regimes of social policing and self-denial. One might make a metaphorical stretch that pillorying someone on Facebook is the moral equivalent of putting them in the stocks. Rothman, associate editor of Commentary magazine, takes that stretch well past its breaking point in this denunciation of modern progressivism and those spoilsports who don’t like eating meat or jokes that play on ethnic slurs. To his credit, the author notes that moral policing was once the province of conservatives, but in his depiction of the modern left as a legion of fun-haters and life-deniers, he forgets that modern right-wingers are doing every bit of their part in keeping the culture wars going. “What I set out to do when I began to write this book was have some fun,” he writes, but his book is anything but. The author repeats his leftists-are-Puritans thesis to dulling effect (if anything, the true proponents of “cancel culture,” whether left or right, might be better likened to Red Guards), and his taunts about gender fluidity, veganism, taking a knee, and cultural appropriation wear thin very quickly. Indeed, the best glosses on much of Rothman’s material come not from him but from interlocutors such as the comedian Judy Gold, who remarks of potentially transgressive comedy, “When intent and context and nuance are taken out of the equation, it’s no longer a joke.” The author concludes by hoping his book gets publicly cancelled in order to boost sales. It’s perhaps likelier that it lands in the hands only of fellow true believers and won’t make much of a dent among anyone but them.
Readers already convinced that leftists are the Orwellian thought police will find merit. Everyone else can pass.
