If you haven't had this reaction while listening to NPR...

...then you are hopelessly brain dead.

Reason on David Mamet's conversion:

The Secret Knowledge grew out of a bridge-burning 2008 essay that Mamet wrote for the left-wing Village Voice. In it, the Pulitzer-winning playwright boldly walked back his own life-long leftism and described the clinching moment in his political journey as having occurred while he was driving in a car with his wife: “We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up.”

My experience came in the late '80s after being forced to listen to one too many of the "human interest" stories that NPR played during the "morning rush" with subjects like "Aids activists teach Shakespeare to inner city children."  There just came a point when threading the politically correct cliches in order to listen to the biased news just wasn't worth it anymore.

 This is interesting in that it links Mamet's rejection of leftist utopianism with his return to Judaism and the concomitant realization that attempts to make a heaven on Earth are always doomed to boom-a-rang.

The Secret Knowledge is clearly the result of much reading and extensive contemplation. Mamet’s references range from Tolstoy and Trollope to Friedman and Sowell to Marx and Brecht and the immortally entertaining Susan Sontag. He celebrates his Ashkenazi heritage and, centrally, the Torah, which he sees as a keystone of this country’s Judeo-Christian foundation—a font of true justice, as opposed to the fashionable “social justice” he so witheringly reviles. (On hate-crime laws: “[A]s if getting beaten to death were more pleasant if one was not additionally called a greaser.”) He adheres to the “tragic view” of human nature—we are all irredeemably flawed, prone to corruption, and incapable of perfect understanding—and is thus deeply skeptical of any attempt at root-and-branch social transformation, however slickly retailed. He is especially eloquent in noting the latest instance of this evergreen political scam: “[S]hould we all simply mass behind a leader so charismatic and well-spoken as to induce in the electorate that state of bliss which, though it may momentarily be indistinguishable from madness or satori, necessitates eventual return to a world made more complicated by our surrender[?].”