A provocative if dispiriting look at the endless campaign to curtail the big lie and a million lesser ones.
A data strategist examines misinformation and disinformation as promulgated by right-wing Americans.
Being a “lie detective” is in some ways easier than other kinds of gumshoe work. As Issenberg, author of The Victory Lab, recounts, when he called on a Republican misinformation minion a couple of election cycles back, the fellow proudly proclaimed, “We have three major voter suppression operations under way.” That was just the beginning. The rumblings of conspiracy first seen in the days of the tea party became the chaos of QAnon, and the lies mounted as Trump normalized lying. Interestingly, that lie machine was first used on Republicans by Republicans, with rumors floated in the 2000 primary that John McCain was “a godless heathen” and had had a Black child out of wedlock. Also interestingly, much current conspiracy thinking can be traced to Gamergate, the “open-source reactionary movement” that began as a malicious rumor machine against a woman video game maker and turned into an army of right-wing trolls. Republicans may not like the word disinformation, Issenberg writes, since they “think it’s an excuse to silence, cancel, or censor them,” but that’s just what it is. The author also looks at Brazil, which has legislated against disinformation and is quick to fine and shut down bad actors. However, it’s a giant game of whack-a-mole, with new sites and new lies cropping up instantly and those arrayed against it faced with the “recognition that ultimately disinformation would move too quickly, and too stochastically, for anyone to successfully police it.” In other words, there’s not much to be done about the right-wing web of lies. As one data activist notes, “We will win some and lose some, and will probably start to lose more.”
A provocative if dispiriting look at the endless campaign to curtail the big lie and a million lesser ones.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798987053621
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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