Former NPR CEO tells Mark Levin how he learned to love the Right

LevinTV host Mark Levin says he rarely buys books for himself, but he recently bought and read the new book by former NPR CEO Ken Stern, “Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right.”

“Republican Like Me” is a firsthand account by Stern, a longtime liberal Democrat who realized he was living in a bubble and decided to do something about it. On his radio program Thursday, Levin talked to Stern about his one-year journey across America.

Listen:

“It really began with trying to do as much as I could,” Stern said. “I needed to go someplace where I could have some honest conversations.”

Stern described how he visited churches and evangelical conferences, bars and Tea Party meetings, watched NASCAR races, and listened to conservative talk radio.

“I met people who, I think, were angry that they’d been left out of the national conversation. [That] weren’t represented by the establishment – including the media establishment,” Stern said.

It was a transformative experience for Stern, who said he now does not identify as a partisan. “At the end of the day I didn’t come away as a Democrat or Republican; I came away as a skeptic.”

Stern hopes his book will open the eyes of his liberal colleagues in the media to see America in a different perspective. 

“I spent a lot of time with Republicans. I spent a lot of time with experts … I spent a lot of time with people who are doing poorly in this economy of ours and are angry about it. Trying to understand it from their perspective. That’s really ‘Republican Like Me’ — me trying to see things from their perspective and learning things from them.”

But, says Levin, conservatives can learn from Stern’s book too.

“It really is a fascinating book, and I think my audience would like it very, very much, because you know what? A lot of us really can’t get into the minds of liberals,” Levin said. “And so when we read a book like this … it was intriguing to me.”

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