Provocative reading that will no doubt appeal to Schneider’s fans.
A conservative-leaning comedian and Saturday Night Live alum thunders about the loss of free speech in “woke” America.
“I am a traditional Liberal, which, apparently, makes me a right-wing fascist now!” Schneider writes. When, for example, he spoke out against the Covid-19 vaccine mandates in 2021, he says, liberal media outlets made him out to be “dangerous,” but “no one in media dared call those Democrat vaccine skeptics antivaxxers like soon-to-be vice president and antivaxxer-while-Trump-is-president, Kamala Harris.” (Harris in fact said while campaigning that she wouldn’t necessarily trust Trump’s assurances about the rapidly developed vaccine but would trust a “credible” source that vouched it was safe.) Schneider also found himself targeted for holding controversial opinions on transgender surgeries for children, which he likens to a radical form of gay conversion therapy except “at least ten thousand times worse.” He praises conservative Blacks such as SCOTUS member Clarence Thomas and economist Thomas Sowell, shaking his head because asking “inconvenient questions of the 2020s government” gets them branded as “race traitors.” The comedian suggests that for these and similar views on the “scamdemic” and the unnecessary alarmism about global warming, he has become much like his stand-up idol, Lenny Bruce: a performer blackballed by mainstream late-night shows because “they don’t want an opposing point of view.” Schneider buttresses his views by citing historical events as examples of the government’s “sociopathic behavior,” such as the “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which the U.S. Public Health Service infected unsuspecting black men with syphilis for 40 years, and a CIA program that administered LSD “to unwitting subjects in social situations”—though it’s not clear what these cases have to do with the current federal government urging people to get vaccinated. “Dissent is democracy. Not allowing dissent is tyranny,” Schneider concludes. Readers need not care for his confrontational style to agree with that statement.
Provocative reading that will no doubt appeal to Schneider’s fans.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781546007869
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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