Diogenes-Light: A Kind of Insanity Has Gripped the West. Ya Think?!

Dear National Review Friend,

You know it has gripped the West—"it" being the insanity, a bizarre multicultural mix of 1984 and Alice in Wonderland, that is the suffocating zeitgeist of the Leftist elites. And the time has come for someone to explain what the heck is going on, and how the heck we got here, and how the heck we get out of the rabbit hole.

We're little more than a week away from the official publication release date of Michael Walsh's new book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, a copy of which you can and should pre-order right here at Amazon.

In this powerful new polemic, Michael (best-selling fiction author, National Review writer, music critic, PJ Media columnist, and a.k.a. the infamous David Kahane, author of Rules for Radical Conservatives) writes:

"Look about your daily lives here in early twenty-first-century America and Western Europe, and see the shabbiness, hear the coarseness of speech and dialogue, witness the lowered standards not only of personal behavior but also of cultural norms, savor the shrunken horizons of the future."

The task of The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West is to answer the question: How did we get here? In a sweeping and thoroughly original polemic that recalls Camille Paglia's seminal Sexual Personae, Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and even Robert McKee's Story, Walsh surveys Western cultural decline through a lens of sex, religion, high and pop art–and weaves in the fascinating story of how a small band of central European nihilists, known as the Frankfurt School, penetrated and subverted America's psyche. In 21st century America up is down, black is white, life is death, and male is female.

The Devil's Pleasure Palace traces our willingness to negotiate away these most obvious truths to the advent of "critical theory," whose assault on Western values and institutions, including Christianity, the family, conventional sexual morality, and patriotism hobbled the West's cultural confidence. For while "critical theory" was hatched in the ivory towers of Morningside Heights, Walsh shows how it quickly seeped into the water supply and permeated all areas of American cultural life.

The Devil's Pleasure Palace is a political book with x-ray vision, peering through today's left-right divide to a different set of cultural struggles. It is about Milton versus Marx and Marcuse, the everyday American against the scheming intellectual, and, above all, about redemptive truths versus Mephistophelean fantasies.

What a mouthful (take a bow, Encounter copywriters!). And here's what some very respected conservatives have to say:

William Kristol : "Ranging over the centuries and across the continents, from high culture to war to American society today, Michael Walsh has written a dazzling, exhilarating, and thought-provoking book. Whether we end up liberating ourselves from 'The Devil's Pleasure Palace' or not, Walsh has made clear what's at stake."

Victor Davis Hanson : "In this learned and engaging book Michael Walsh takes us on a literary, philosophical, and pop-cultural odyssey of Western society, from the Greeks to the present. He reminds us that in the age-old war for the soul of the West between the bored and nihilistic creatures of affluence and leisure and the autonomous individual who honors his past and seeks transcendence in his religion, the bad guys are exhausted and now meeting their comeuppance. A delightfully depressing tour that ends at an unexpectedly optimistic destination."

Kathryn Jean Lopez : "There is poison in our bloodstream. Michael Walsh works to pump it out by bringing it to the light of day. The Devil's Pleasure Palace shows us how we got here and how our souls and our culture are being suffocated. There is hope in knowing our history and wanting something better. This book equips that cause-one aimed toward heaven."

You owe it to yourself to really know what is going on in our society. You really owe it to yourself to get Michael Walsh's new book, The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Order your pre-publication date copy right now at Amazon.

Best,

Jack Fowler
Publisher
National Review

Diogenes-Light

A Kind of Insanity Has Gripped the West. Ya Think?!

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