I really wanted to like this book, as I am a big fan of Andy's columns in the New Yorker. The book lacked the punch and the humor that his columns have. (I may have come at it with the wrong mindset.)

Profiles in Ignorance is a sharply-written book about prominent American politicians who have owned their ignorance. This is one of those subjects where if you don't laugh at it, you just may cry. I have long followed the Borowitz Report in the New Yorker, so I was excited to read this book. Andy Borowitz is such a gifted humorist and satirist and this did not disappoint! I listened to the audiobook, which the author deftly narrates, at times with impressions. So many parts had me laughing out loud. He frames the ignorance of politicians so skillfully, giving his readers the background of what's going on in the world and culturally. As several Republicans are the main target, this is probably a book for Democrat political junkies. Highly recommended if you're looking to learn and have a good laugh.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for providing this ARC. All thoughts are my own.

I liked how this was broken out into the three stages of ignorance: Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration. I appreciated the sections and how they walked through very relevant information.

I think this book was well done, a great satire, and made me laugh and cringe at where we have come as a society today

This book was well researched and provided a tapestry of the stupidity and pompous nature of politics in this country. It is sad that we have accepted that this as status quo and that no one seems to be interested in ending this. I really wish this book would have been organized by president as opposed to the way it was setup because it did seem to go back and forth a bit and seemed to meander a bit from the point. I ended up having to read this one in small segments as it just did not keep my interest to read directly through. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

An excellent account of the gradual decline in American political discourse and… well, intellect. Having lived through the administrations/years covered in the books (George W. Bush onwards, really, was when I started really paying attention to politics), I found the earlier chapters most interesting.

Borowitz does an excellent job of letting the subject he writes about do most of the heavy lifting — allowing their own words to do most of the damage.

Amusing, engaging, and hard to put down. I really enjoyed this. Definitely recommended.

This was a brilliant, well-researched overview of the political scene in the United States over the past 50 years or so. Borowitz is of course best known for his satirical column The Borowitz Report in the New Yorker, and although this book still has plenty of humor, it's pretty much completely factual. More factual than the dreadful creature that is news entertainment where the facts don't matter as long as the story makes sense in the reader/viewer's worldview.

I like that the book was divided into three sections: the ridicule, the acceptance, and the celebration of ignorance. Borowitz obviously writes from a US-American perspective, but I have no doubt whatsoever that many people from across the world can point at the political history of their home country and find a similar trend.

The book is classified as humor, but you could easily shelve it under horror. Because as Borowitz shows, we have devolved into seeing ignorance as a virtue. Worse even, highly educated politicians have started acting as if they are ignorant of the facts. They celebrate being uneducated and mis- or uninformed. Appropriately, I think, that the author has woven a call to action throughout his book: stop excusing ignorance in your elected leaders, whether they are just acting the part or not. In a democracy, those wanting power should have to prove that they have the knowledge and understanding to lead the country. And us voters should demand that proof before we elect them.

Hilarious and mind-boggling. I had no idea that Ronald Reagan’s post-mortem branding as super-genius conservative mind was so far off from reality, as he was president when I was quite young. I had forgotten the mortifying details of Sarah Palin’s brief career in national politics, My only complaint about the book is that, given how fresh the reader’s experience with Trump is, the portion devoted to him is too long and detailed, and it doesn’t contain anything most people don’t know and remember quite clearly.

Profiles in Ignorance
Andy Borowitz
Simon & Schuster eGalley
September 13, 2022
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Three Stages of Ignorance

The First Stage: Ridicule: Dumb Politicians Pretend to Be Smart
Borowitz holds nothing back. He says it out loud: Ronald Reagan is dumb and a racist. Reagan’s talents distracted us from his ignorance and was more responsible for the rise of ignorance than the fall of communism. He had a voracious television habit. For instance, he watched Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music instead of reading a briefing before an economic summit. He also believed that pollution's greatest contributors were trees and plants. He had one Black man on his staff and he didn't recognize his HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce at a mayors’ meeting at the White House. He called him Mr. Mayor. Unbelievable.

Reagan had three main ideas: Communism is bad, government is bad, and Capitalism is good. His slogan? “Let’s make America Great Again.”

Adlai Stevenson II, was the grandson of Grover Cleveland’s Vice President, Adlai Stevenson. Harry Truman urged him to run for president. Adlai appeared intelligent, but wasn’t much of a scholar. But, he was dubbed an egghead, which the Democrats loved. He lost in a landslide to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

[Roger Ailes espoused that the next politician to hold office will have to be a performer and so he gave Richard Nixon a media makeover.]

Borowitz had a lot to say about Dan Quale: His ignorance distracted us from his negligible talents. He tried to get by in college using his family connections and his good looks. He admitted to being anti-consumer, yet became VP candidate to GHW Bush (due to his youth and his sex appeal to women (A Robert Redford lookalike?).

A couple of his quotes: “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future”; The future will be better tomorrow.” On October 5th, Quale took to the debate stage in Omaha, in what Borowitz calls the epochal event of the Ridicule stage of ignorance. Moderator Judy Woodruff challenged his (dis)qualifications professed by his own Republican Party members: Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and former Secretary of State Alexander Haig. He became the most disrespected VP in modern history with a 63 percent disapproval rating. He held this honor until 2007, when Dick Cheney took over as the most unpopular VP. (And I haven’t even mentioned the potato(e) fiasco.)

The Second Stage: Acceptance: Dumb Politicians Embraced Their Stupidity
George W Bush espoused that knowledge was the facade of the elites (supposedly Democrats) and made ignorance his proof of authenticity. Hence, George W Bush is the father of the Second Stage of Ignorance: Acceptance. Of course, he was anti-intellectual.

Karl Rove, in 1993, wrote a memo to limit GW Bush’s appearances in order to keep him away from the Capitol press corps. He couldn’t trust Bush not to embarrass himself and the party through his lack of knowledge.
Bush was unable to “wing it.” He won the Governor’s seat of Texas anyway.

Like his father, GW was a racist. He said to a Texas reporter that since the Blacks didn’t come out for him, they shouldn’t expect much from him. He didn’t do much, he didn’t care much, and he didn’t know much and yet, he was elected to a second term. Idiocracy.

And then we had Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate. Sarah Barracuda was a self-proclaimed hockey mom who liked to wink and say, “You betcha!” Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager, said of Palin after she was selected, “She doesn’t know anything…I think that she helped usher in an era of know-nothingness and mainstreamed it into the Republican Party…” The perfect running mate in the Age of Acceptance!

The Third Stage: Celebration: Smart Politicians Pretend to be Dumb
The Third Stage brings us to Donald J Trump, who felt he had to remind us of his immense intelligence with zingers like this: “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country.” Other laughable quotes from The Donald include, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.” Or how about this one: “I know more about courts than any human being.” Borowitz has a field day with Trump, going through years of Trump’s really bad pronouncements about himself. Most of them start with, “I know more about…than anyone in the world.” He also said, “…I look at myself in first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.” Borowitz had a lot of material to work with and he does so in such a wonderful way you will be laughing out loud.

Borowitz considers The Art of the Deal to be
the founding document of the Celebration stage of ignorance. The book brought Trump fame and laid the groundwork for The Apprentice, which led to his presidency. It’s possibly the only book that Trump ever read (a ghostwriter named Schwartz penned the book). The Celebration of ignorance was perpetuated by “alternative facts” in social media and the internet. Other outlets were Fox News, Breitart, and right-wing talk radio feeding the faux news and conspiracy theories for the Trumpers.

Violence, fear, and physical intimidation were used to try to change the voting outcomes. White nationalism showed its force on January 6 at the insurrection of the Capitol. Groups like the Oath Keepers and the 1 percenters stormed the Capitol in an effort to stop the counting of the votes for the presidential election of 2020. People were killed, trampled, bear-sprayed, stabbed with flag poles, and so on. They broke into the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” because they believed he had the power to overturn the election results. He didn’t have that power and Dan Quale reassured Pence that he didn’t. Quale had helped to save our democracy.

Borowitz ends his book with thoughts about what we can do to fight idiocracy. Real conversations, person-to-person, is one way. What to avoid is battles on Twitter and Facebook. That doesn’t work, but getting people to vote does. It’s time we move from observer and making donations to getting out there and fighting for our democracy with voter registrations and conversations. This is how we move forward out of the three stages of ignorance.
I learned a lot from Borowitz’s book. He takes the reader through the stages of ignorance and elucidates on the influence of mass media shining light on the outrageous conduct and ideas from today’s politicians who are better at performing than thinking. He concludes his book with real ideas to fight back against the age of ignorance. An excellent, serious, yet funny, book.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

First, thank you to the publishers for this ARC!

As for the book, it may not come as a surprise to many people that have been at least half awake to the state of politics over the past decade. So while the general premise is not entirely new or revealing, there will still likely be snippets of new information that you'll find. It's overall a light read and entertaining book, but after a while I found myself getting bored, feeling like "ok, I get it..." and not necessarily feeling motivated to keep on reading. So by the second half of the book, I was already skimming as the book author predominately focuses on only on a handful of individuals. I think I would've enjoyed this book more if it had touched on more politicians to drive home the message better.

This may be ironic considering the topic, but humor writer Andy Borowitz’ book on the ignorance of recent political figures is the most intelligent book I’ve read this year. It is also the only book I’ve read this year that I started and could not put down, finishing in 2 days only because I felt the need to sleep and eat. Borowitz examines American politicians from Ronald Reagan to the Trump era (more than just one culprit here) and dissects their output using the simple method of letting them speak for themselves. Borowitz’ dry comments are just the icing on the cake.

Critics who cry that he’s only featuring Republicans can be assured that Borowitz has covered this. Democrats can be blamed for acting stupid (affairs, lying, more affairs), but in general they are faulted here only because they chose to appear dumb to get elected (Bill “Bubba” Clinton was more successful as a good ole boy than Barack Obama, who tried, but failed when he ordered Grey Poupon mustard). I should also mention, for the doubters, that every quote here is cited from reputable sources.

I staved off depression while reading because of Borowitz’ skill at commenting on this craziness with a zinger at just the right time. I am less confident in our ability to embrace his solution, which involves talking and (gasp) listening. But I’m willing to try.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC which I received in exchange for my honest review.

I don't think I have followed the author on social media or read his political satire before, but when I saw the premise of this book, I couldn't resist asking for an arc because it seemed like the thing I would like. And I wasn't completely wrong.

I didn't have many expectations from the book, so it was pleasantly surprising to see the author give an explanation for the way the book is structured and follow through in a very methodical way. It might simplistic on first glance - three stages of ignorance, namely, Ridicule, Acceptance, and Celebration. But once the book gets going with each of these sections, it's easy to see these historical events and rise of the ignorant politician as a natural progression. While I am much more familiar with the Celebration section of the book because I have been living in the Trump era of American politics, I learnt a lot about the rise of Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, and the failures of Don Quayle and maybe Sarah Palin but how those failures have led to where we are today. There were many surprises that also felt inevitable, and because this celebration of ignorance and vilification of knowledge, facts and reality can feel both disheartening and anger inducing, the author writes about these historical figures and events with a lot of humor, just to reduce the sting a little.

I particularly dreaded reading the section about Trump because we have seen it all play in real time and I didn't wanna read those horror stories again but I think this section was relatively smaller than the others, thank god. But even before the release, the book already feels slightly outdated because so much has happened since the author must have finished writing the book, including the Jan 6 hearings and the current Top Secret documents investigation and I'm sure things will get worse. However, the author ends the book on a hopeful note. Ofcourse he agrees that it's not easy because we have to all stop being hobby political activists and actually do work on the ground to change one mind at a time to save our democracy - and maybe these efforts will yield results someday but it feels scarier by the day to me. Changing people's minds sounds like a good idea and even a necessary idea, but I don't know if we are in a position where it's possible to change most minds. I can only hope the author's call to action and optimism works, and more of us actively contribute to bring politics back to the real world, and not live in Trump's alternative reality anymore.

Overall, the book was written in a very humorous way and that's definitely necessary because the content can be very bleak. It's hard to imagine the reigns of the oldest democracy of the world being in the hands of leaders who celebrate ignorance and call anyone else who wants to live in a reality/facts based world as elite - but that's where we could possibly be again and what this book proves is that things can always get worse. So, yes, read this book, have a laugh, but also remember how the events of the last fifty years led to our today and work to change that.

3.5 stars

This book was difficult to rate. Andy Borowitz is a funny man (if you share his politics) and a potent political satirist. The book starts out howlingly funny but he didn't write it purely to make people laugh. It has a serious intent -- to point out that American anti-intellectualism has long been around and that politicians are sometimes (often?) dumb as a box of rocks.

But after the historical litany of brainless quotes and mangled facts and IQ challenged elected officials, it begins to feel depressing instead of funny. If you love satire and intelligent snark and liberal ideology, you might well enjoy this well-written and acerbic overview. But it's a scary picture.

Thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

When did an ignorance turn from liability into a virtue? The author asks, Who’s the most ignorant person the United States is willing to elect? To answer this question, Andy Borowitz looks at the last fifty years of American history and examines several politicians who exemplify the problem. In the conclusion of the book you’ll learn that he wrote this book not only to expose some politicians’ ignorance or to make fun of it. He also looks at the present political situation lamenting the inability of people like him, college-educated white people who he calls “political hobbyists,” to really listen to other people .He offers some suggestions. The book is fun. It goes without saying that the fans of his New Yorker column and TV programs like The Daily Show will love this book. But you could also turn it into a history quiz for a reluctant history student or into an entertaining parlor game with such a wealth of amusing trivia on offer. It's a wonderful read!

Hysterically funny and uncannily informative. I wondered if Borowitz could sustain his humor through the whole book. Silly me. Of course he could! Well researched and a true joy to read. Keep on truckin’ Andy! We love you.

Thank you Net Galley. It was a pleasure to read Mr. Borowitz. I enjoyed his polished, sharp prose and the way he targeted politicians. It was incisive and entertaining. Highly recommended.

What a mostly gloriously fun and irreverent romp through our last several decades of political insanity! Got to hand it to Andy Borowitz for not mincing words and calling a douche bag a douche bag. Obviously, fans of Borowitz will be entertained with his colorful descriptions of Ronald Reagan, Danny Quayle, George the Elder and Shrub, Sarah Palin, The Donald and all the other asshats currently inhabiting the Capital in positions of power. I learned some new and stupid stuff about Ronnie, Big George, goofy Danny Boy and Dubya, since I was but a shrimp myself when they were operating in prime shenanigans mode. Nothing our eloquent and fearless author mentioned about Dump was a revelation to me; guess I’m current on understanding real and present dangers. But, seriously, the point Borowitz makes repeatedly in his writing regarding the willingness of my fellow American citizens to accept and deliberately encourage such ignorance and assholery in our elected officials is nothing less than terrifying and deeply disturbing. So while the read itself is amusing, the message is decidedly far from it. Borowitz concludes his work with some suggestions for citizen involvement which might help to mitigate some of the current insanity we find ourselves in. I appreciated the suggestions as at least lending some sense of hope for the future of our democracy. Thanks much to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC, this has been one of my favorite political reads in a long string of such offerings.

I’m really really enjoying this book so far! Honestly, it’s hard to put down. Andy Borowitz mixes humor with the truth about what has happened and is happening in US history. I’ve actually learned so much I didn’t know about before! I totally recommend giving this book a read, it’s well worth it! Thanks Net Galley & Anthony Borowitz for giving me the awesome opportunity of reading this book!

When I look at my news app I can almost always tell when a pice is from Andy borowitz from the title. He has a knack for grabbing pieces of our reality, some of them incredibly unbelievable and then making them seem even more ridiculous.

Profiles in Ignorance by Andy Borowitz is a satirical, funny book about contemporary American politics. Did I say funny? It's hysterical. No one is let off without the trademark Borowitz humor and satire, whether it's Trump or Biden or the whole class of congressional buffoons. Read this book!

This book was, mostly, pretty boring - but it did have some interesting parts to it. I think it could have been cut down a tad, but I think it engaged me enough that I would recommend it to people who wanted to learn more about the topic.

5.5/10