Scattershot fearmongering.
An alarmist manifesto against big government, big tech, big finance, big education, and all the other putative enemies of the private purse.
“They are coming after your livelihood, aka your path to wealth,” writes Roth, author of The War on Small Business. Who are they? The “new financial world order,” which aims to make sure that you lose and “the wealthy and powerful” win. And how will this nefarious cabal pull it off? For one thing, by forcing such things as “mandatory vaccines and masking,” which of course are just plots to make government bigger. For another, by accruing debt that makes the dollar weaker and then ceding American hegemony in the global market, a process that began with the abandonment of the gold standard. You don’t even own the software on your cellphone and computer thanks to these evildoers, who have replaced plain per–mark version ownership with subscriptions. One day you won’t even own a car thanks to Uber and similar companies. Dare speak up, and you’ll wind up on some blacklist, such as a journalist banned from PayPal—though, Roth doesn’t add, the supposed journalist wasn’t shy of saying nice things about Hitler and often supporting radical right talking points—and the Canadian truckers who protested having to be vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to enter the U.S. In support of her various scarecrow theses, Roth adduces such luminaries as Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Peter Thiel, whose like-minded utterances are invariably “tremendous” or “fantastic.” Her targets are of the broad-side-of-the-barn variety: There’s Amazon, of course, which “wants to be entrenched in every facet of your life”; every institution of higher learning in the land, “cheered on by the useful idiots saying that you must go to college”; and, naturally, every company that has bought into the environmental, social, and corporate governance model.
Scattershot fearmongering.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304932
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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