Book summary “I Am America (And So Can You!)”: summary

Introduction

You worry that modern culture is collapsing under the weight of secularism, coastal elites, and shifting moral standards. You wonder if the traditional American way of life can survive an onslaught of scientific consensus, Hollywood liberalism, and changing family structures.

Stephen Colbert argues in I Am America (And So Can You!) that true patriotism requires defending gut-based truth, rigid domestic hierarchies, and absolute resistance to modern progressive elites.

The book outlines the defense of traditional American values across major pillars of society. You will examine the strict demands of the nuclear family, the moral foundation of Judeo-Christian faith, and the proper role of pets and seniors. You will also confront the corrupting influences of higher education, scientific expertise, and Hollywood culture.

The following questions guide this exploration:

• How do you maintain discipline without listening to your children?
• What makes a dog the ultimate conservative companion?
• Why does science threaten the American gut?

1. The American Family and Domestic Order

The traditional nuclear family remains the indispensable biological building block of America and must strictly follow defined hierarchical roles. You must structure the home around a mother, a working father, and children to mimic the stability of a nuclear isotope.

The traditional nuclear family requires strict hierarchical roles, distant authority, and arbitrary rules to build discipline.

Fathers must act as distant, unpleasable authority figures who work over 100 hours a week and never visit a doctor. Mothers must remain entirely in the home to nurture children and avoid working, raising the traditional 2.3 scamps. Femin-Idi-Amins threaten this natural order by demanding careers outside the household.

Colbert recalls his childhood memory of his parents leaving him with an old babysitter named Ruth. This prompted him to command his stuffed animals and cat Cleopatra to form a resistance in his emergency linen closet.

The Nuclear Family Structure

Baby daddies must maintain emotional distance from their offspring to ensure proper respect. You can keep siblings quiet and competitive by picking a favorite child. America itself resembles a child that rebelled against a strict, distant father who kept making unreasonable demands.

Childrearing and Arbitrary Rules

Childrearing requires strict arbitrary rules and emotional distance to instill profound respect for authority rather than logic. You should enforce completely arbitrary standards to teach children discipline without encouraging independent thought.

You must follow specific household regulations:

• wash your hands before talking to strangers;
• if you look at a cat and it sneezes, no dessert for a week;
• Jell-O must never be jiggled;
• red means stop, green means go, purple means Wednesday.

Buyers of Colbert's book must also adhere to strict handling standards to avoid purchasing Chinese counterfeits from merchants who might as well have an eye patch and a parrot. You must verify that your copy includes an official ribbon. If the book lacks a ribbon, you should keep smiling and nodding at the store clerk before calling the police.

You must protect the volume by observing clear physical restrictions:

• treat the book with the Accepted Minimum Standard of Respect without highlighting, underlining, or margin doodles;
• never use the book as a coaster, hammer, fly swatter, umbrella, or fan;
• never loan the book out to anyone;
• use money of at least twenty dollars or another copy of the book as a bookmark if the ribbon is missing.

2. Religion and Agribusiness

Judeo-Christian values form the foundation of American law while pets and seniors serve specific defensive functions.

Judeo-Christian Values

America is an explicitly Christian nation where religion serves as the sole foundation for law, morality, and divine military victory. You can rely on the Ten Commandments as the basis of the entire legal system, providing necessary social cohesion, hope, and responsibility. God holds an undefeated win-loss record when fighting on the side of America and Christianity.

Lieutenant General William G. Boykin described victories over terrorist enemies by stating that his Christian God was a real god and the enemy's god was an idol. You have access to 10,000 Catholic saints available as customer service reps during spiritual crises. Lucifer once led 133,306,668 fallen angels against God's good angels in the War in Heaven.

Atheists driving Big Secularism are systematically removing religious displays from public squares and undermining religious foundations. Pete Stark remains the only self-described atheist currently serving in the House of Representatives and Senate.

You can observe this cultural threat in everyday municipal decisions:

• a town hall in a coastal Connecticut hamlet ordered the removal of a nativity scene to appease secularists.

You must fight back against these no-goodnik no-Godniks and Secul-azis by adopting a clear defense strategy:

• celebrate Christmas bigger than ever by purchasing multiple trees to defy secularists.

Pets and Agribusiness

Children's books and media falsely portray animals as cuddly equals. In reality, pets only use humans for food and walking. Simultaneously, agribusiness transforms livestock into meat rapidly through industrial factory farming.

Shasta disappeared after fourteen years, and parents claimed she went to live on a big beautiful farm upstate. On a factory farm, a cow goes from mooing to stewing in just ninety seconds among the six billion humans on the planet.

You can manage domestic beasts by following strict guidelines:

• select the right animal based on your lifestyle and desire to dominate;
• give your dog's paw a hearty squeeze and never break eye contact;
• ensure your dog says roof and not ruff.

Senior citizens represent an over-coddled segment of the population supported by Social Security. You fund retirement systems that reward seniors for doing nothing, much like uninvited party guests. Nobutane Matsuhara reached the age of 113 while recognized as the new Oldest Man in the World.

Old man Schmidt sat in a rocking chair like a Nazi prison camp guard, screaming Auf Meine Grass! Das ist Verboten! whenever anyone stepped on his lawn. You should put the Greatest Generation, Vorzoths, and the Jazzy Set to work defending the borders. AARP members can line a 2000-mile-long front porch built along the border with Mexico to deter illegal crossings.

3. Sports Sex and Higher Education

Performance-enhancing drugs maximize athletic entertainment while higher education and homosexuality threaten traditional power structures.

You must embrace the five big Ss of Adolescence, which are School, Sports, Sex, Sodomy, and the Silver Screen. Modern behemoth athletes arrive on the field with 2% body fat to entertain you.

Athletes should be entirely free to use performance-enhancing drugs because they are really enjoyment-enhancing drugs for the public. You demand superhuman physical feats and entertainment, so sports should remain maximally entertaining without regulations on what athletes inject. Barry Bonds achieved legendary athletic performance through these means.

Healthy trash-talk is a vital pillar of sports and competition that prevents people from slipping into mediocrity. Smack-pie helps opponents remain focused and keeps sports competitive instead of turning into a trophy-for-everyone participation award system managed by the Coach PC Police.

• Hey Carl, what's your favorite system of geologically significant caverns? Mine is Carlsbad at basketball!

Sports and Drugs

Sex is fundamentally about power, specifically the power to create life, ruin a life, and sex it up well. Men and women approach sex very differently, with men thinking about it constantly and women prioritizing emotion and love within the sex flower.

You went on a first date bowling match with Tr-cy G-ll-w-y where you crushed her score to prove dominance. You must navigate vaginal roulette carefully among the total human population of 6 billion.

• Treat sex like alcohol and make sure you are in control
• Do two-thirds of the talking on a date

Animals in the wild threaten human democratic sexual values because of their rampant public mating and homosexual behavior. Zoodomites like bonobos and seahorses practice Fishy Style, while male octopuses detach their sperm-filled arms and die in the process.

The word homosexual should be returned to its proper meaning of heterosexual because all babies are born straight. The Lavender Armageddon threatens culture, and Austin is a reformed homosexual who went through a rehabilitation program called God Also Yearns.

• Next time you get cut off in traffic, say to yourself I bet that guy is gay
• Picture your wife cheating on you with a gay guy
• Go to the bathroom when everyone else is asleep, look at the mirror, and whisper You are gay

In 1952, acceptance of the gay lifestyle was so low there were exactly two homosexuals in the continental United States. You can spot a hidden garbanzo bean using specialized diagnostic flow charts.

Sex Power and Education

Higher education minds with academic concepts and exposes students to New Ideas that cause emotional and physical distress.

Edu-bators inside the Ivory Jungle turn students into criminals like Ted Kaczynski, who went to Harvard and Berkeley before becoming the Unabomber. Reading about these dangerous institutions causes 100 dogs and cats to be euthanized in animal shelters.

• Do not attend a single lecture in college
• Lie on your college application résumé to build experience

Tenure should be abolished and replaced with strict loyalty and cognitive requirements enforced by thought-stingers. Academic faculty must pass tests of patriotism and penmanship instead of enjoying lifetime job security.

• Demonstrate mental competence by memorizing a secret loyalty oath
• Eat a bug to prove your love for the country
• Produce evidence of at least five years of heterosexual congress

4. Culture War and Science

Hollywood liberals and empirical scientists wage war on traditional values through secularism and the scientific method.

Hollywood and Class War

The golden age of Hollywood succeeded because the major studios maintained corporate hegemony and enforced strict moral codes. On May 4, 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that the Big Five studios violated antitrust laws. On March 31, 1930, the Motion Picture Production Code took effect. On 1952, the Supreme Court ruled that movies were protected by the First Amendment. Studio heads changed actors' names, such as Joan Crawford born as Shprintzel Anatevkawitz and Cary Grant born as BalgokUth, Devourer of Souls.

To end the entertainment industry's stranglehold on society, consumers must completely boycott modern media and adopt alternative lifestyles. Colbert compares the necessity of total pop-culture immersion or avoidance to his father forcing him to smoke an entire carton of Kools when caught smoking at age twelve.

• Boycott! Cut them off from your money. Immediately stop consuming all entertainment.
• Switch to Christian entertainment! Play games like Left Behind: Eternal Forces instead of Grand Theft Auto.
• Write letters! Send e-mails on an hourly basis to the child-poisoners.
• Go camping! Drop off the grid into nature with a group of like-minded patriots and a cache of weapons.
• Consume everything! Totally immerse yourself in the filth of pop culture to build a callus on your soul.

Mainstream outlets like NPR and The New York Times lack the black-and-white truth found at Fox News. NPR Morning Edition content consists of 57% glowing descriptions of fundraising and 39% sound effects. Society is strictly divided into classes with a middle class annual federal tax bill of $25,000 and lower class Nike Air Force 25 Supremes priced at $175. Thomas Bindlestaff earns an annual salary of $18,000 in company script. Illegal immigration requires managing 12 to 14 million unauthorized immigrants and a proposed 2,000-mile long wall along the southern border.

• Heavily arm volunteer militias and acquire night-vision goggles.
• Build a 2,000-mile long wall along the southern border with machine-gun nests and a flaming moat.
• Take away the honey pot by giving illegal immigrants undesirable American jobs like pottery teacher or bass player.

Rejecting Science

Scientific inquiry and empirical observation are dangerous cult-like activities because reality possesses an inherent liberal bias. In the 18th century, scientist Edward Jenner introduced smallpox vaccines that saved lives but destroyed the magic amulet industry.

The traditional scientific method should be replaced with a two-step method rooted in creationism and blind repetition. Mainstream science proposes a timeline of fourteen billion years ago for the Big Bang.

• Step 1: Remember: Six thousand years ago, God created the Heavens and the Earth.
• Step 2: Repeat as necessary.
• Step 3? Repent as necessary.

Citizens should reject scientific elitism and the unvetted rules imposed by experts who spend twenty years in a laboratory wielding pipettes. These PhDs write three-hundred-page dissertations, and four out of five dentists recommend Crest. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859.

• Step 1: Fill your fishbowl with the water.
• Step 2: Drop the hamster (you can call it "Skip") into the fishbowl.
• Step 3: Cover the fishbowl with Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.
• Step 4: Observe if the hamster is evolving gills or a tiny hamster flamethrower.
• Step 5: Let the hamster go.

True political truth comes straight from the gut rather than facts and polls, a philosophy famously delivered directly to President George W. Bush.

At the April 29, 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, D.C., Colbert stood feet away from President George W. Bush and delivered a blistering satirical speech championing gut-based truth. The speech referenced a 32 percent presidential approval rating and a 68 percent disapproval rate. The human small intestine measures 26 feet compared to a 10-inch brain.

• Move the head from the cryogenic freezer to a refrigerator, placing it in a pan at least two inches deep to catch juices.
• Alternatively, place the head in a big pot full of cold water, allowing a half an hour of soaking time per pound, replacing the water every half hour.
• Ensure the head is in a leak-proof package to prevent brain tissue from absorbing moisture and becoming mushy.
• For microwave thawing, set power to low-medium for six minutes per pound, rotating occasionally, while avoiding room-temperature overnight thawing.

10 Key Ideas

1. The traditional nuclear family requires strict hierarchical roles, distant authority, and arbitrary rules to build discipline.
2. Judeo-Christian values form the foundation of American law while pets and seniors serve specific defensive functions.
3. Performance-enhancing drugs maximize athletic entertainment while higher education and homosexuality threaten traditional power structures.
4. Higher education minds with academic concepts and exposes students to New Ideas that cause emotional and physical distress.
5. Hollywood liberals and empirical scientists wage war on traditional values through secularism and the scientific method.
6. The traditional nuclear family requires strict hierarchical roles to mimic the stability of a nuclear isotope and raise the traditional 2.3 scamps.
7. God holds an undefeated win-loss record when fighting on the side of America and Christianity against atheist forces.
8. Athletes should be entirely free to use performance-enhancing drugs because they are really enjoyment-enhancing drugs for the public.
9. The golden age of Hollywood succeeded because major studios maintained corporate hegemony and enforced strict moral codes.
10. True political truth comes straight from the gut rather than facts and polls, a philosophy famously delivered directly to President George W. Bush.