The book has little news for anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s a useful overview all the same.
A legal scholar examines disinformation as a go-to in the authoritarian toolbox.
Disinformation is ubiquitous and often laughably transparent, as when Trump brays about the 2020 election, but it works. As McQuade notes, two-thirds of Republicans believe that “the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true…and that violence is a legitimate response.” The Jan. 6 insurrection may just have been a practice run, but meanwhile the disinformation flows, abetted by election deniers who have been busily taking over state and local GOP branches and becoming overseers of future elections. McQuade examines several aspects of the playbook. One longtime Trump ploy is to paint his opponents with idiotic epithets such as “Sleepy Joe” and “Ron DeSanctimonious,” which “seem juvenile, but they serve the same manipulative purpose as other forms of disinformation.” The author doesn’t spare the media, which, she argues, has exaggerated its watchdog role to assume that government malfeasance and corruption are more widespread than the facts warrant, constantly hunting for the next scandal. Disinformation is a Clausewitzian war by other means, a way of dominating and diminishing opponents without violence, and it relies on constant lying. The current GOP dogma, for example, is not just that Trump won in 2020, but also that we live in a republic and not a democracy that demands that our leaders should make decisions for us, “providing cover for far-right values that are not shared by the majority of Americans.” McQuade’s handbook doesn’t add much to the literature on disinformation, but as a national security prosecutor, she’s well placed to liken what’s going on now to al-Qaeda’s mastery of digital media “to recruit and radicalize members with propaganda”—a thought guaranteed to trouble one’s sleep.
The book has little news for anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s a useful overview all the same.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781644213636
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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