Click the cover, buy the book!

Notice to readers: We are scrapping the Great Living Americans nominating process due to your miserable failure, and hereby revoke your suggestion privileges. The eXiled has also initiated a review of our policies regarding the solicitation of reader input to make sure that a similar tragedy will never happen again. You people depress us.

In honor of Independence Day, I’d like to return to the topic of Great Americans, or the lack thereof. In an earlier article, I mentioned the Civil War era as a remarkable generator of Great Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, William Tecumseh Sherman, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and Ambrose Bierce. I noted that it’s much harder to come up with a list of Great Americans living today. (I nominated Muhammad Ali, Cesar Milan, and the Coen Brothers.)

I asked for nominees, and readers responded with the following:

(more…)

The following is an adapted excerpt from Alexander Zaitchik’s book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, just released by Wiley & Sons.

Every July 4, Glenn Beck emcees the Stadium of Fire celebration in Provo, Utah. The patriotic extravaganza is the most elaborate Independence Day celebration in the country, drawing more than fifty thousand people annually to Brigham Young University’s LaVell Edwards Stadium for a program of family music, star-spangled speeches, military displays, and a magnificent array of fireworks. Sponsored by the conservative Mormon group Freedom Festival, the Stadium of Fire is the closest thing in the country to an institutionalized Rally for America, Beck’s controversial 2003 traveling pro-war roadshow. It is not surprising, then, that this is among the high points of Beck’s calendar year. “There’s nothing like Utah on the Fourth of July,” he likes to say.

(more…)

Story first published on AlterNet

Anyone interested in taking the pulse of the GOP base in 2010 has a few options. They can watch Fox News at any hour of any day. They can trot down to their local Tea Party, where the overwhelming majority of participants vote, and have always voted, Republican. They can visit the various official party Web sites, where the leadership has crafted a message to resonate with the angry anti-government mood that defines today’s conservative grassroots. (more…)

This story was first published on Alternet.

There is a fresh interpretive fad in the young field of Tea Party Studies: The New Right of 2010 as the New Left of the 1960s.

According to this nascent meme, today’s conservative grassroots holds strong echoes of earlier radicalism on the left. The Tea Party movement that worships Sarah Palin and screams for Barack Obama’s birth certificate is, in this view, more than just the latest herpetic outbreak of Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid “pseudo-conservatism.” It is a reincarnation of the New Left and 1960s counterculture. The Tea Partiers, it is becoming fashionable to argue, are the heirs not just of the John Birch Society and the young Barry Goldwater, but also of Students for a Democratic Society and the young Abbie Hoffman. (more…)

Read the sensational Vanity Fair profile on The eXile, and founding editors Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi: (more…)

This afternoon, groups of angry conservatives will gather on street corners and in parks across the country to protest.

They will carry signs and deliver speeches expressing outrage over the Democrats’ stimulus bill, over entitlements, over budget pork, over taxes. They will dump boxes of tea on the ground and wear three-cornered hats. The leading lights of the Republican Party will be on hand to cheer them on.

But as with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage are not what they will seem.

Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent “Tea Party” protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or “fake grassroots”) lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core. (more…)

The guy on the left in the Santa suit is responsible for up to fifty murdered sex slaves, including his own daughter.

A version of this article first appeared in the February 2008 issue of Penthouse magazine.

NIZHNY TAGIL — Last March, The eXile reported a story so shocking and so gruesome that it made every other item in the Russian crime catalog seem like a parking violation.

Browse Column

If you read the story, you remember it. A mass grave containing the mutilated remains of more than a dozen teenage sex slaves was unearthed in a forest outside Nizhny Tagil, an industrial city of 400,000 just east of the southern Urals. The young victims were linked to a local prostitution ring that had been kidnapping, enslaving and killing local girls for five years. Even by Russian crime standards, the story jumped out, blacker than pitch and colder than a snow-frosted corpse.

There were remarkably few follow-ups to the discovery, first reported in the Yekaterinburg edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda. While the Bittsevsky Maniac was working on his Chikatilo rerun, earning top billing in the Russian press and beyond when caught, the Sex Slaves of Nizhny Tagil were killed a second time by an uninterested and jaded media. Most Russian papers merely allotted an in-brief blurb to the mass murder. Aside from our short report, the Guardian was the only other English language outlet to mention the crime. Komsomolskaya Pravda was the only Russian daily that delved into the nitty-gritty and asked why it went unsolved for so long. (more…)

I started hearing about OMON before I ever saw them. I’d only been in Moscow a few weeks when a bar debate erupted over the authenticity of a YouTube clip purporting to capture an OMON deathblow. During an arrest an OMON officer had unleashed a series of strikes that left his victim crumpled on the ground.

Some said the person died of internal bleeding. Others doubted it. In any case, I made a mental note of the word: OMON. (more…)

In the autumn of 1998, I got a call from Edward Limonov asking me if I could do a favor for him. His newspaper Limonka—known for its mix of extreme politics and avant-garde aesthetics—was preparing to celebrate its fourth anniversary at the Mayakovskaya Museum.

“My boys begged me to bring Johnny Rotten to the party,” Limonov told me, laughing. “I know it’s a small chance, but maybe Mr. Rotten will think it’s interesting to speak before a group of radical Russian youths who worship him.”

(more…)