Like many on the academic left, Bronner is not satisfied with merely suggesting that those who disagree are wrong. They also are evil. And their ideas do not even merit a hearing. He goes after those tricky bigots who “believe that the content of speech is always secondary to the right to speak.” (You know, like the authors of the Constitution.) “This logic,” warns Bronner, “permits intolerance, places stupidity on the same level as intelligence, and attempts to bind future generations to the ignorant prejudices of those that preceded them.

If the people who run The Onion ever decide to launch an academic publishing arm, I have a manuscript to recommend. The only problem is that they would first have to buy the rights to The Bigot, from Yale University Press. The book, an exercise in conspiracy theories and amateur psychology, reads like a series of tweets from someone on a cruise sponsored by The Nation. Hashtag #hitlerhomophobeteapartynormanpodhoretzkukluxklan.

This is the kind of book that makes you wonder whether peer review should be anonymous. Because really, when you’re done with The Bigot you will want to go to the homes of the people who gave this book their stamp of academic approval and ask in all seriousness: “What were you smoking?”

Stephen Eric Bronner, a “Distinguished Professor of Political Science” at Rutgers, says he didn’t write this book “with the naïve idea of converting bigots.” Rather it is “to help educate the bigot’s enemies.” And there’s not much point in trying to “compartmentalize” the kinds of bigotry either. Because “prejudices such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism and religious intolerance … intersect in their ideological and political expressions.” Spoiler alert: They intersect in the Republican Party, which is basically run by the Tea Party. And neoconservatives. Who have a lot in common with neo-Nazis. I digress, but then so does Stephen Eric Bronner.

Bronner sees bigotry as no less a problem today than it was a hundred years ago. The bigots are just better at hiding their true feelings. But Bronner’s got them figured out. And his assumptions allow him to cite a study from the 1920s to justify his pronouncements about bigotry today. So, for instance, “The bigot is most often found in nonurban settings and parochial communities among the lower middle class, low-level bureaucrats, small business owners, individual contractors and farmers—though industrial workers, particularly white men, are among others who can also prove racist and authoritarian.”

Bigots are mostly white male hicks, Bronner concludes. And bigots “have always felt at home in the United States,” he explains, citing the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and the Moral Majority. Have bigots been more at home in the U.S. than in other countries? Which ones have historically been more tolerant? He doesn’t mention.

He just continues with the forward march inside the bigot’s head: “Myths have always held a particular attraction for the bigot,” he pronounces. “They offer an intricate network of symbols and meanings for making sense of life even today.” Never mind that myths have always held a particular attraction for … all of humanity. But what does Bronner mean by “myth” anyway?

He offers the example of someone in Mali who helped to amputate the left foot and right arm of four thieves. (Someone in the government? Someone acting on his own? We’re not told.) The man said, “It is not us who ordered this. It is God.” Bronner explains this incident by writing, “myths are easily adaptable to the self serving outlook of the bigot. They are nonfalsifiable by definition, they contest modernity and they rest on traditional beliefs—and that is why they appeal to him.” Ahh yes, the problem of traditional beliefs.

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