A stark warning to be taken seriously.
A scathing look at the MAGA crowd and the existential threat they pose to American democracy.
As a writer on terrorism and fascism, Nance has previously specialized in two areas: the workings of al-Qaida and the Islamic State and the mindset and actions of Trump and his followers. In this follow-up to The Plot To Betray America, the author blends them to examine the movement he calls “TITUS, the Trump Insurgency in the United States,” whose practitioners and supporters, like the best terrorists, blend into the community and are perfectly content with the thought of killing anyone who disagrees with them—all with the aim “to destroy American democracy and install Donald Trump as dictator.” Trump might like nothing better, or he might have other plans. Regardless, writes Nance, Trumpism is not likely to disappear, especially now that the Republican Party has become its wholly owned subsidiary and is doing whatever it can to dismantle voting rights to disenfranchise its opposition and retain permanent power. Meanwhile, the TITUS tribe, by Nance’s account, is executing a carefully planned four-part strategy that centers on avenging the 2020 election—a matter that could embrace executing opposition politicians. “Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East,” writes the author, “have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization,” pathways that very often wander into the realms of make-believe (as with QAnon’s fevered distortions) by way of online sources. The author digs deep to describe organizations and individuals coordinating with TITUS, including the Proud Boys and a depressingly high number of active-duty police and military-service personnel. That Trump proved a remarkably inept president does not deter these supporters, who form a base that “has become an openly fascist movement”—and, Nance concludes, represent a threat that “America will have to confront for the next generation at the least.”
A stark warning to be taken seriously.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27900-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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