While intensely informative and alarmingly eye-opening in its expose of intrigue, deceit and thuggery by the political right, this is not an easy read. Brock is brilliant but he wields his mastery of detail as a blunt instrument. He needed a stronger editor. If the book was to be an expose of the Republican smear campaign against the Clintons, the web of cronies, deceit and hijinks he illustrates is compelling. If the book is a dish on his enemies, the details of their hypocrisy are dishy. If it is a tale of a gay man’s collaboration and later fallout with the political establishment most at war with the LGBTQ population, he has that covered. If it is to be an act of repentance for his own (very effective) acts to smear both Anita Hill and the Clintons, he does recount in excruciating detail how he wandered into that thicket and slowly, excruciatingly found his way out. Along the way there is much grief, recrimination and a few healthy dashes of self-pity.
Put it all together and Brock could have had a compelling, rollicking read. But delivered as they are with Brock’s insane attention to detail, those themes get drowned and the reading is often a chore. The book encouraged me to skim in many places. He recounts more players that Tolstoy did in War and Peace, and includes too much trivial detail that does not drive the narrative: every party he went to, restaurants where the players meet, what they look like, what they wear, their history, their organizations. It overwhelms any one of the stories Brock is eager to tell. What he could have highlighted more with some editing is how the players fit into the interrelationships that form the morbid inbred pond of dishonesty and hypocrisy that was and is the Republican establishment. That was interesting.
On top of the information dumps, Brock is just plain wordy. Never succinct, his interior monologues go on, over and over again. We get it, the tension of being the gay rainbow fish in the shark tank. (He’s never that catchy, unfortunately). Get to the point!
Given his attention to detail, it’s no wonder that, even though written back in 2002, Blinded covers a number of players now familiar to most Americans: Bill Barr, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham (his special friend), Tucker Carlson, George Conway, Kelly Ann Conway, Robert Bork, Brett Kavanaugh, Judge Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Mark Levin, Arianna Huffington and more. The intricate relationships of all these to each other is mind boggling and for me illuminating. Most of these names had some hand in working with either Ken Starr or Clarence Thomas. Much intellectual inbreeding in that bunch.
Then there are the players of yesteryear who hardly show up today, like Bill Bennett, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley, Robert Novak (latter two deceased of course) and many others. And then there are about another 200 bit players Brock calls out. It’s overwhelming as a read for someone with merely a passing interest in political history. For example on one page, he throws out 10 names in one sentence, some of whom are mentioned either never again, once, or twice more. It’s a coup-counting of little interest and does not serve any narrative.
To be fair, Brock is quick and witty in the physical descriptions. For folks he does not like, he is unflattering. Christopher Hitchens was a ‘misshapen, unkempt, and seemingly unshowered.’ Yes, Brock can be quite catty, though he’s usually more subtle in his descriptive takedowns. For folks he likes, he’s flattering. For example, buddy Naomi Wolf is ‘stunning.’
So why read this? I came away from Blinded with a startling appreciation for how far back the total lack of ethics in the right’s political gamesmanship extends. You see the genesis of today’s morally bankrupt conservatism (Trumpism). Brock does not cover all of the Republican descent into madness—the book predates the Tea Party—but he does disclose where many players of today came from and how they all relate. The reader can then extrapolate to the current dysfunction. Reading how it began, seeing the teapot that became the tempest is eerie.
For example, there is the always-present Richard Mellon Scaife, a billionaire who was like a shadowy third Koch brother, funding an astounding number of magazines, think tanks and campaigns against the Left and the Clintons in particular. That such men have so much power in America is a sobering takeaway. Scaife provided the oxygen and fuel to support an incalculable volume of propaganda. Most of the people he subsidized would have had to have found real jobs if not for him, and perhaps have done less damage.
Brock and his unrelenting dishy details also highlights the roaring hypocrisy of all the righteous blowhards like Gingrich and the Moral Majority who hid their own marital infidelities, sexual harassment, mistress-abortions etc. while railing against the left for their sexual liberality. In fact, sex appears to have been the prime engine driving the Right’s witch hunts. They were so obsessed with the Clintonian sexual escapades and intrigues, real and imagined, one has to wonder if the New Right was working out their own repressed sexualities through anger and demonization of the Other (Clinton, Brock, et al).
In the end of course this is a book about ambitious humans. They are an odd bunch, these folk who would rule us. I don’t have any misconception about the Left being any less weird, ruthless or ambitious. Bill Clinton would have been better remembered if he could have kept his dick in his pants and while some of the allegations against Bill were admittedly fake, Hillary’s reflexive derision of all Bill’s accusers has not aged well. But you have to wonder if there is a deep sickness that inhabits the Right. This book gives a glimpse into their parlor, and it is not pretty.
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