A dispiriting but eye-opening hop down the QAnon rabbit hole, where plenty of literal madness lies.
When Trump tweets a typo, is it secret code? As this odd report from the land of conspiracy theory demonstrates, plenty of people think so.
NBC News investigative reporter Cook examines five families who have been swallowed up, in some way or another, by the outlandish claims of QAnon. It doesn’t take much to see that buying into the ideas that space lasers are causing forest fires, that Tom Hanks enjoys torturing children, and that pedophiliacs congregate in pizza parlors is an expression of mental illness. However, as the author recounts with considerable empathy, that illness is a kind of death by despair, one to which elderly and isolated people are especially vulnerable. In one instance, a widowed mother, emotionally broken, denounced her son for voting for “your beloved China Joe” instead of Trump, who she believed was going to orchestrate a massive roundup of Deep State personnel on December 22, 2020. In another case study, a woman in failing health came to believe that “vaccines didn’t just cause autism anymore,” but were part of a government conspiracy. Behind all of this misguided thinking are hucksters making a profit, whether selling horse medication as a cure for Covid-19 or survival kits for the zombie apocalypse. “In this regard,” writes Cook, “QAnon was a microcosm of the Trumpian Right: a more extreme and insular product of harmonized lies from right-wing politicians, media figures, and influencers”—and all with profit in mind. Hard reality—the loss of jobs, marriages, family, friends—can sometimes turn QAnon believers around. But overall, Cook concludes, “what we’re facing is as much a wellness crisis as it is a disinformation crisis,” one that will require an army of therapists to deal with.
A dispiriting but eye-opening hop down the QAnon rabbit hole, where plenty of literal madness lies.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593443255
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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