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MINISTRY OF TRUTH

DEMOCRACY, REALITY, AND THE REPUBLICANS' WAR ON THE RECENT PAST

Not likely to win over many from the other camp, but with a good amount of signal among the partisan noise.

A fierce takedown of right-wing mendacity committed in the service of a bigger lie.

It’s one thing to spin fables about the phone company killing JFK. It’s quite another to take an event within recent memory and twist it out of all recognition—to say, for instance, that the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol was just everyday tourist visitation or legitimate political protest. As Benen, a producer for the Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The Impostors, writes, any Republican who wants to make such claims has to do so without an ounce of bashfulness or self-doubt, for the public will pick up on the fearful scent and leap. “Republicans who intend to replace a factual series of events with fictitious ones must fully commit to the new narrative,” he writes, “no matter how ridiculous it is.” Thus Sen. Tommy Tuberville in a nutshell, and thus the rationale for all of the chaotic performance art on the part of a panoply of GOP leaders: Kevin McCarthy, say, who condemned the Jan. 6 attack but then, in the very next breath, declared that Trump had won the election; the refusal of Republicans up and down the ballot to commit to honoring the results of the next election (“election results are to be embraced when GOP candidates prevail”); their insistence that Trump is the victim of a weaponized Justice Department and not a con man brought to justice. The spin continues: In the current cycle, Republicans are focusing on inflation as a talking point, ignoring that the economy has grown and the unemployment rate has fallen during the Biden administration. Unabashedly one-sided, Benen paints with a broad brush, but not without reason.

Not likely to win over many from the other camp, but with a good amount of signal among the partisan noise.

Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024

ISBN: 9780063393677

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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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

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ELON MUSK

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

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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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