Reddit reviews These Truths: A History of the United States

>Any good reading material on the depths from which Mitch McConnell hailed his saggy ass?

These Truths by Jill Lepore

I picked it up after hearing an interview with the author on NPR. It's an absolutely fantastic read, This blurb from the Amazon description is more eloquent than I could ever be:

>Americans are descended from slaves and slave owners, from conquerors and the conquered, from immigrants and from people who have fought to end immigration. "A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history," Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. "The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden," These Truths observes. "It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it."

I was far from sufficiently sophisticated enough to be able to understand the long-term ramifications of turning Bangkok into the Amsterdam of Southeast Asia after the governments in the Philippines and South Vietnam closed down most of the brothels there many years ago. I "get it" now, however.

There's tremendous money in turning a city into a world-renowned sex resort. Enough to make it possible for the people who profit directly therefrom to buy all the political influence they need to keep it going. As well as to set up "conversion cults" to brainwash the unsuspecting and turn them into sexual slaves they can then sell to the highest bidders who operate the sex parlors.

(To be fair, this has been going on at least since the earliest days of the old "Silk Roads," but in the half century preceding the turn of this century, humanist organizations -- including agencies of the United Nations -- had made some inroads into the elimination of it. In the last 20 years, however, the return of authoritarianism and sex-addicted male chauvinism at high levels of political power have evidently disempowered such efforts.)

The process of "conversion" works about like this: The Typical Path of Cult Involvement. See also How Cults use Benign Portals to Seduce new Recruits (in my reply to the OP on that thread), though many of sex slaves in hardscrabble Southeast Asia appear to have been kidnapped or even sold into slavery by desperate parents or older siblings, eliminating any real need for conversion more or less as this outfit seems to be doing it.

Believe it or not, there are evidently deals like this in the US. Evangelical / fundamentalist / charismatic / ostensibly (but not actually) "Christian" "orphanages" (mostly in Appalachia and the deep South, but also in the plains states just west of the Mississippi River) where mostly female children are "converted." (The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog author Bruce D. Perry has dealt with a fair number of them over the past 30 years.)

Anyone who understands the politics and history of slavery as well as These Truths author Jill Lepore can pretty easily connect all the dots: From sex to money and back again.