Right-wing politics are scary now, but this well-researched account foresees an even darker future.
Journalistic account of the rise of the increasingly influential—and virulent—far-right cabal whose members “have been on a yearslong fascist march.”
“I think there’s not enough violence in today’s day and age.” So declared Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes in late 2016. HuffPost writer Campbell has for years been following what in essence was a street gang gone viral, one named, with due irony, after a song from the Disney movie Aladdin, performed at a school performance by “a twelve-year-old boy with brown skin.” By the author’s account, a mere non-White complexion is enough to set McInnes into paroxysms of rage, since the Proud Boys are among the chief fomenters of the “replacement theory” that holds that White people are being crowded out of America by members of one-time ethnic minorities. The loosely knit but growing group’s vision of the world may be “chaotic,” writes Campbell, but the threat they represent to their political enemies—i.e., anyone to their left—is real. As McInnes once proclaimed, “We will kill you, that’s the Proud Boys in a nutshell. We look nice, we seem soft, we have ‘boys’ in our name, but like Bill the Butcher and the Bowery Boys, we will assassinate you.” The group’s leadership in the 2017 Charlottesville riots and its de facto bodyguard status for Donald Trump at the storming of the Capitol have yielded plenty of legal trouble, with conspiracy charges leveled at 17 members for their roles in the latter event. Still, Campbell suggests, Jan. 6 was only a warm-up. Even as the Proud Boys are “working to sanitize their image,” they continue to create chaos at school board meetings, women’s health clinics, and statehouses. More disturbingly, their numbers are growing, and they have become “the most successful political extremist group in the digital age.”
Right-wing politics are scary now, but this well-researched account foresees an even darker future.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-306-82746-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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