Given the odds that someone you know buys into QAnon doctrine, Rothschild’s rabbit-hole dive is a valuable guide.
An investigation into the shadowy QAnon movement, which brought us the Capitol invasion of Jan. 6, 2021.
Journalist Rothschild, a specialist in conspiracy theories, states his thesis early on: “No conspiracy theory more encapsulates the full-throated madness of the Donald Trump era than QAnon.” Though Trump may have had only a dim understanding of the movement that regarded him a messiah, the violence of Jan. 6 was part of a continuum that included “numerous incidents of domestic terrorism,” including at least one attempt to assassinate Joe Biden. Its premises are bizarre: Democrats, according to the QAnon canon, are deeply implicated in an international system of pedophilia, milking their victims for the superdrug called adrenochrome. Rothschild, who draws on a large body of interviews with family members and a few apostates, delves into the origins of such beliefs, which hark back to antisemitic screeds of centuries past. He also suggests that dismissive attitudes toward true believers that peg them as brainwashed cult members aren’t helpful. QAnon supporters are seeking meaning in a bewildering world and have simply chosen a weird path that suggests that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and is going to reclaim his father’s crown or that lizard people are doing their business in advance of an alien invasion. All that said, though, Rothschild also warns that “while most Q believers are just misguided people looking for a good answer to a difficult question,” they are capable of significant acts of violence—and are almost certainly destined to commit it: Jan. 6 was one manifestation, but all over the country, there have been innumerable instances of acts such as a drunken Texas woman who tried to run cars off the road to help Trump battle “the cabal and the pedophile ring.” To conjure a truly disturbing portrait of an ever growing subculture, read this one alongside Pastels and Pedophiles by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko.
Given the odds that someone you know buys into QAnon doctrine, Rothschild’s rabbit-hole dive is a valuable guide.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-929-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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