The Travesty Book Series
Understanding how we got here gives a basis for “what next” scenarios.
Unravel the Mystery
If You Have Been Concerned
If you have been concerned about how things are going in the US, these books provide deep context to help compartmentalize your dismay and envision a brighter future.
About the Series
The Travesty Series traces the moment when a culture’s guiding words grow dim, its moral vocabulary thins, and its institutions drift from the principles that once gave them shape and legitimacy. In these brief but probing books, author and book producer Paul Stokstad examines the fractures of American public life with historical depth, literary force, and moral seriousness, following the fault lines where politics, religion, media, and civic language have come loose from truth, restraint, and shared democratic purpose.
Each volume is both diagnosis and meditation: an effort to understand how a nation loses its bearings, how public distortion becomes normalized, and how inherited ideals can be hollowed out from within. Yet the series is not written in the spirit of surrender. Running through it is a persistent hope that clarity can still be recovered, that honest words still matter, and that what has been damaged in the American experiment might, through courage and recognition, still be reclaimed.
Explore the Books
The Talking Dead
How the Republican Party Lost its Way
A sharp, historically grounded examination of how the Republican drifted from fiscal responsibility into spectacle, grievance, distortion, and the steady erosion of shared political reality.
Life Support
How the Democratic Party Lost its Mojo (and what to do about it
A concise political reflection on the Democratic Party’s erosion, tracing how charges of elitism and growing internal factionalism weakened its national coherence and reach.
The Religious Wrong
The Anti-Christ Coalition
The second book is an exploration of how religious language was fused to political power, reshaping Christianity into tribal identity and distancing public faith from compassion, humility, and conscience.
The Travesty In Chief
He Who Shall Not Be Named
An examination of a certain unmentionable public figure fails as a public model, showing how his conduct has normalized cruelty, falsehood, vanity, impulsiveness, and contempt for democratic and societal norms.