I was hanging out with an old friend over Thanksgiving and had some interesting conversations. He's turned into close to a tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist and is convinced that America will no longer exist in a year or so.

While I'm not ready to buy into most (well, essentially any) of the ideologies and theories he's convinced are true, it did make me think I should read some good anti-establishment essays or books just to see what's out there.

So, who are some good, non-whacko, political muckrakers, dissidents, anarchists, etc. that have valid, coherent arguments that are worth checking out.

I've obviously seen Chomsky's name all over the place but have no exposure to the actual content of his writings. Christopher Hitchens also seems like he's mad and drunk enough to make some good points, but again, I haven't read any of his stuff.

Where should I start?

Well, it depends on what you're going for. You're not really going to find tinfoil hat conspiracy with either of those guys, and I can't think of anyone having suggested that the country isn't going to be here in a year. Was he talking to Immortal Technique? Is your friend a gun nut/Montana Freeman?
Chomsky has some pretty radical opinions/suggestions, but he concludes these using facts. He's clearly pretty far on the left, but there are few people I can think of that are as omniscient to the American foreign policy as he. Unfortunately, he's not an exhilarating read. The audio books don't make him much better, but I still think he's completely worth looking into. He puts out a book a year or so and they're usually about $8.
Hitchens is a more entertaining read, but I certainly wouldn't call him a conspiracy theorist by any standards. He's definitely brilliant, although he's sort of scattered himself all over the political spectrum. You're likely to agree strongly with at least 55% of what he says. But he's also kind of a smug douche sometimes.
Either way, they both have websites that have hundreds of articles by them for you to peruse for free.
I'll probably be called all sorts of wrong for these characterizations, but that's how I see them.
Are you going for wild, out there ranting nuts? Like Illuminati/Area 51/the government monitors our locations with cell phones type shit?

I like Jim Hightower

Hightower is a fun speaker, but what I've read of him was terrible. (That's based on his column in a local defunct weekly.)

Howard Zinn would be a good backbone for reading of this type. Like Chomsky, he's not talking about end-of-the-world scenarios, but he uses facts to present another side of the argument.

Pretty much nailed him.

Check out AK Press for anarcho stuff. You might be able to get some spoken word from Alternative Tentacles or G7 Welcoming Committee.

Hey look, Obner's now on the gov't. watch list.

I'm not really looking for the conspiracy theory stuff, my conversations last week with my crazy friend just got me thinking about this kind of thing and now I'm just generally looking to be exposed to some well researched and fact based alternative view points. Maybe histories of political movements or criticisms of the current media, really just anything that's worth reading outside of what I'm exposed to by reading mainstream newspapers and watching the news channels.Of course, being an entertaining read would help things along.

Barry Goldwater - Conscience of a Conservative

I like listening to Hightower because he has a great radio voice, however, I don't like reading him. Thom Hartmann works well on both levels, though.



criticism of current media, there's hundreds of books on this topic, and I've only read a few, but I found that one to be pretty interesting.

as far as histories, go with a People's History of the United States by Zinn. It's a long book, but it's incredible and eye-opening about what our history is based on, written by the folks that didn't win, i.e. the dissidents. there's like 200 audio versions available, too, read by dozens of actors. He also has a website with a lot of articles and interviews to check out.

another great read is Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen. It's a lot shorter than the Zinn book, but it basically dissects what we're taught in schools as kids and then shows how far off base most of it is.

For current news, there's any number of strata that you can delve into ranging from batshit crazy to terrifying to slightly less biased mainstream news. I sort of mine the latter two, and try to stay on top of the Democracy Now podcast/TV show (hosted by the aforementioned Amy Goodman) and the Economist audio edition, which also puts out podcasts. The former is accused of pandering to the left, but it's also one of the better news programs that has no corporate interests to steer it and thus to me has less of a filter. Therre are plenty of stories that I roll my eyes when hearing, but it's still damned good journalism most of the time. I think the Economist is probably one of the best news sources in existence, but it's not cheap and I gloss over a lot of the financial stuff. Hence the downloading.

I can post a bunch of links later if you're looking for specific articles, but I'd have to look around. or if you just wanna browse around, there's always znet.

oh, and Greg Palast, who's a reporter for the BBC but virtually ignored here. Lots of his stuff is about election fraud (lately) and documenting the oil grabs in Iraq. his stuff is pretty terrifying, and he usually has documented proof to really scary things. And apparently he's a contributor to suicidegirls now. Huh.

Thanks, cotton. This is the type of stuff I'm looking for.

Art Bell

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archiv ... hington_7/

Huge list of books here.

sorry just realized this was a request for conspiracy or dissident literature... the list i posted is recent political books.

Political books are cool as well. Just looking for stuff slightly out of the mainstream.