Mike Allen is the most famous journalist at THE POLITICO. His "Playbook" newsletter sets the agenda for much of DC's media class. Mike Allen's dad, Gary Allen, was a racist, lunatic right wing author. Let's peruse one of his books, shall we?

It is not a secret that Mike Allen's dad was a crazy right wing conspiracy theorist and favorite of the John Birch Society. The fact was reported in a 2010 New York Times Magazine profile of Allen. Mark Leibovich wrote:

Gary Allen was an icon of the far right in the 1960s and 1970s. He was affiliated with the John Birch Society and railed against the "big lies" that led to the United States' involvement in World Wars I and II. He denounced the evils of the Trilateral Commission and "Red Teachers." Rock'n'roll was a "Pavlovian Communist mind-control plot." He wrote speeches for George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. "Gary Allen is one of the most popular writers that John Birchites read and believe with a zeal that is nervous-making," wrote Nicholas von Hoffman in a 1972 Washington Post column...

I asked Mike Allen what it was like being his father's son. "We have a very close family," he said slowly. "I'm very close to all my siblings, and I'm very grateful to my parents for all the emphasis they put on education and family and sports and Scouts." He called his father "a great dad." How did he make his living? "I don't know the details of it," Allen said. He did some teaching, but Allen said he was not sure where or what age groups, whether elementary school or high school or something else. He had an office at home. "To me, he was my dad. So that's what I knew." He says he never read anything his father wrote.

It seems a shame that Mike Allen, whose brand of journalism is now so lucrative for America's business class, has never read anything his father wrote. The revelations about Gary Allen's bizarre politics drew some gentle ribbing at the time, but as far as we can tell, nobody actually went to the trouble of publishing any extended excerpts from Gary Allen's work. Apropos of nothing—just because we recently got our hands on one of Gary Allen's books—we will now rectify that.

COMMUNIST REVOLUTION IN THE STREETS, published in 1967 (when Mike Allen was three), must be considered one of Gary Allen's finest works. Do not be misled by the title. Gary Allen is not advocating a Communist revolution in the streets; rather, he wrote this book to warn the fine people of America about the looming risk of Communist revolution in the streets. (Did this ever end up happening? Must check. -ed.) In fact, as the intro says, "Gary Allen donned beatnik clothes and grew a beard to see Communist-controlled agitation from the inside—at Berkeley, Watts, and many other hot spots in Mississippi, Chicago, Delano (California) and elsewhere in America's inside, twilight war." The book goes on at length about the role that Communists were playing in the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the anti-poverty movement, and often approvingly quotes J. Edgar Hoover.

Some highlights of this important work are below.

The terrifying prospect of the "all-Negro Nation."

"Revolutionaries are working on plan to burn whole cities, Los Angeles included."

Martin Luther King Jr., a dangerous Communist subversive "at war with the white man."

A close brush with a "young Negro fanatic."

Cesar Chavez led a Communist plot to sabotage agriculture and starve Americans until they "lose the will to resist."

A final thought: "we are at war with history's greatest mass murderers."

The most unsettling thing about Gary Allen's writing is not its palpable insanity. It is the fact that his rants against Saul Alinsky, "community organizers," and an existential terror threat to America by shadowy others would not sound so out of place coming from a right wing political media type in 2014, who was being quoted in THE POLITICO.

[Pick up your own copy now!]