Published November 20, 2024

Reading “Holy Terror” for the 10th or 12th or 20th time has me no less unsettled than the first time. That’s because of where we find ourselves. The book is like a rewind of a GPS the bad guys used in the early stages of a journey of conquest.

If you can get your hands on it, I highly recommend it. I’m not sure how anyone can put it down once they start going through it. It was frightening in the early 1980s, and as a check-in with the past and the present, it comes with all manner of fright.

Every quibble I’ve read or heard about the book since 1982 is akin to someone complaining about spilled tea after the Titanic struck the iceberg. A guest on “The 700 Club” in the ’80s tried to discredit the book on the basis of its type of footnotes, calling that format a giveaway that the authors were up to no good. It was such weak sauce even for “The 700 Club.”

If you want to read more about how we got here, this book is for you. Don’t let the word salad its critics will throw at you keep you from reading this important history if you have the stomach for it.

From ‘Snapping’ to ‘Holy Terror’

The authors, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, emerged on the national stage with the 1978 publication of their book “Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change.” People of a certain age surely remember that phenomenon gripping the U.S. in the ’60s and ’70s. The overlap in “Holy Terror” is unavoidable, given what the ’80s wrought.

Writing about the context in which their book seemed necessary, the authors went on to say that “something else happened in 1980 that went beyond the moral crusades of the new fundamentalism. The mood of the country turned mean.”

They noted something else in the runup to the election of 44 years ago this month, that “much of this anger seemed to be engineered and fully orchestrated; the tone, the slogans, the priority of issues and targets were virtually identical from place to place.” As they traveled the U.S., the authors were witnessing the birth of something that has existed ever since and only grown in sophistication and scope.

“Holy Terror” is a serious book. Its echoes ring out today, as a new book correctly reports.

I give both my highest recommendation.